B.2. Portlets, frameworks, and other languages

A lot of developers nowadays like to use certain frameworks to develop their applications because those frameworks provide both functionality and structure to a project. For example, Struts enforces the Model-View-Controller design pattern and provides lots of functionality, such as custom tags and validation, that makes it easier for a developer to implement certain standard features. With Liferay, developers are free to use all the leading frameworks in the Java EE space, including Java Server Faces (JSF), Struts, and Spring MVC. This allows developers familiar with those frameworks to more easily implement portlets and also makes it easy to port an application that uses those frameworks over to a portlet implementation.

Additionally, Liferay allows for the consuming of PHP and Ruby applications as portlets, so you don’t need to be a Java developer in order to take advantage of Liferay’s built-in features (such as user management, communities, page building, and content management). You can use the Plugins SDK to deploy your PHP or Ruby application as a portlet, and it will run seamlessly inside Liferay. Liferay has plenty of examples of this; to see them, check out Liferay’s plugins project (which is just a Plugins SDK prepopulated with sample portlets) from Liferay’s public code repository.