Liferay is an open source portal made available under the MIT license. They provide a geronimo+liferay distribution from their website, which is basically a zipped up geronimo/tomcat server with liferay already deployed. I had some problems starting a fresh install of this distribution due to hsql database driver issues. Hopefully new users who experience this same problem will find the entry I posted in liferay's support forum about how to get it working: http://forums.liferay.com/index.php?showtopic=5348
Liferay currently uses a snapshot of geronimo 1.1 from 5/3/2006 which has the new versioning functionality but as you can imagine is missing several important bug fixes and schema changes. I got their WAR working in geronimo 1.1 after making some adjustments to its geronimo-web.xml. When geronimo 1.1 is officially released I'll offer my assistance to help them upgrade to it. I also think and have heard others mention that liferay is a great candidate for a geronimo plugin. Adding the necessary plugin files to the liferay WAR is straightforward. But there are a couple of interesting challenges where I would like to get your input. First is that the plugin prereqs a database pool. Some expert users will want to manually create and populate the database and then use the console to point a db pool at it before installing the liferay plugin. But I imagine that some developers and more casual users would like for geronimo to automatically create a database pool for them as part of the liferay plugin install process. That way they could add a working portal server to their geronimo server with only a few clicks in the console (remember Joe's mom? ;-) For this latter class of users geronimo could provide a plugin that defines a derby datasource and automatically populates the database when the plugin is installed. Does this sound like a reasonable idea? I thought geronimo might already provide some facility to populate the database and I found this dev thread from last year where its proposed but (I assume) not implemented yet : http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/geronimo-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] This idea sounds right on to me. Are others still in favor of it? If so then I would like to work on an implementation. By the way, liferay currently does not support derby but I have it (mostly) working via a patch that I'll submit to them later. The second interesting aspect of creating liferay plugin is that liferay wants to use '/' for its context root. The problem is that the geronimo welcome app is already installed in the '/' context root and this prevents liferay from starting. I tried moving it to a different context root but then hard-coded references to scripts and images in their html started breaking. Is there a way to make geronimo override a context root such that last in wins? Or could the plugin metadata specify the required context root so that the console can warn the user about potential conflicts before installing the plugin? Any ideas? Looking forward to your feedback. Best wishes, Paul
