Before you learn and understand how Liferay DXP Development helps your business save money and time, there are a few questions that we can ask ourselves as webmasters. For instance, how often have you had to start over a new project from scratch? Probably almost as often as you’ve created a new project because you must write the fundamental code elements each time to build a project.
At the same time, you also need to develop the underlying code that supports the project. Of course, it’s never a good feeling to write the same kind of code repeatedly. Notwithstanding, each new project you do after a while can feel daunting. For instance, it’s as if you’re writing a new set of database tables, a new API, a new set of CSS classes and HTML, and a new set of JavaScript functions.
Be that as it may, wouldn’t it be great if there were a platform that provided a baseline set of features that gave you a head start on all that repetitive code? What lets you get right to the features of your application platform or website rather than making you start over every time with the basic building blocks? There is such a thing, and it’s called the Liferay DXP Development environment.
Nowadays, everyone is concerned about the economy and how to keep their money safe amid what appears to be a significant downturn in the previous 60 years. Open-source providers had been stressing other OSS benefits such as control, risk reduction, better fit to business, and standards in the last 24 months that appear to have significantly returned to value-oriented marketing.
A Basic Introduction To Liferay DXP Development Environment For Webmasters
Liferay DXP is one of the most flexible applications on the market today concerning database and application server support. It supports various databases and application servers, freeing you to use the ones you think are best, and it also scales very well. You can install Liferay DXP on a shared hosting account, a multi-node cluster running a commercial app server, or anything in between.
Liferay DXP Development offers design developers a complete platform for quickly building websites, applications, and services, using features and frameworks designed for rapid development, good performance, and ease of use. The base platform is already there, and it’s built as a robust container for applications that you can put together in far less time than you would from scratch.
Technically, Liferay DXP Development also ships with a default set of standard applications you can use immediately: web experience management and collaboration applications such as forums and wikis, documents and media, blogs, and more. These applications are often designed to be customized, as is the system itself. You can also extend them to include your functionality; this is no hack.
For your information, because of Liferay’s extensible design, customization is by design. Eventually, Liferay DXP is used successfully in all of these scenarios daily. In short, Liferay was written by developers for developers to help you get your work done faster and more efficiently, to take the struggle out of web and mobile application development so that writing code becomes enjoyable again.
The Crucial Liferay DXP Development Environment Machine Clustering Rules
Liferay has been highlighting that Liferay Portal is not only a wise decision for saving money now but also for giving your organization a long-term competitive advantage. Although they want to persuade decision-makers that open source may save money, they also want to adopt technology suitable for business in the long run. Nobody wants to be blamed for poor decisions made three or five years ago.
Regarding its clustering methodology, Liferay DXP Development can serve everything from the smallest to the most significant websites. Out of the box, it’s configured optimally for a single server environment. If one server isn’t sufficient to serve the high-traffic needs of your site, Liferay DXP scales to the size you need. Liferay DXP is designed to scale to as large an installation as you need.
One of the most often cited characteristics is its versatility. It can be used to build websites of all sorts, from huge websites with hundreds of thousands of articles to smaller, highly dynamic, and interactive websites. This includes public websites, internal websites like intranets, or mixed environments like collaboration platforms. Developers often choose Liferay for one of these cases.
In most cases, Liferay DXP works well in clusters of multiple machines (horizontal cluster). Or in clusters of multiple VMs on a single machine (vertical cluster) or any mixture. Several optimizations must be made once you have Liferay DXP installed in more than one application server node. At a minimum, Liferay DXP should be configured in a particular way for a clustered environment.
Consider the following:
- All nodes should point to the same Liferay DXP database or database cluster.
- Documents and Media repositories must have the same configuration and be accessible to all cluster nodes.
- Search should be on a separate search server that is optionally clustered.
- Cluster Link must be enabled so the cache replicates across all cluster nodes.
- Hot deploy applications to each node individually.
Suppose you haven’t configured your application server to use farms for deployment. In that case, the hot deploy folder should be a separate folder for all the nodes, and plugins will have to be deployed to all the nodes individually. This can be done via a script. If you have farms configured, you can typically deploy to any node’s deploy folder, and your farm configuration should sync all nodes.
Liferay DXP is based on the Java platform and can be extended by adding new applications, customizing existing applications, modifying their behavior, or creating new themes. You can do this with programming languages supporting JVM, such as Java, Scala, JRuby, Jython, Groovy, and others. It’s lightweight and can be deployed to various Java EE containers and app servers.
It also supports a variety of databases. Because of its customization ability, you can add support for more app servers or databases without modifying its source code: develop and deploy a module with the needed features. Before starting to plan your Liferay DXP deployment, it’s essential to include different environments to maintain the projects. Liferay uses various elements for systems.
Including:
- Development: The environment where the software is written. Most simply, it is developer workstations containing integrated development environments with version and dependency handling and a version control system with working copies on the individual developer workstations.
- SIT (System Integration Testing): SIT is where the systems delivered are validated. There is an environment for testing the automation of aggregated components and the dependencies between them.
- UAT (User Acceptance Testing): A QA or Test environment. The developers deploy the software here when it’s ready for users to verify its functionality.
- Production Staging: A pre-production environment that’s as close as possible to the production environment for final testing, such as installation, configuration, deployment and load, and performance testing.
- Production: The environment that’s accessed directly by end users. Because this is the live environment, updates are done using a secure process, mainly if it is a complex clustered environment.
When considering deploying Liferay DXP, selecting the exemplary architecture is one of the first decisions you must make.
The vital factors:
- Information Security: Securing sensitive hardware and information from malicious attacks and intrusion
- Optimal Performance: Supporting the desired number of total users, concurrent transactions, etc.
- Fault Tolerance: Maintaining uptime during unexpected failure or scheduled maintenance
- Flexibility And Scalability: Designing an expandable architecture to support additional features and users without significant redesign
Ultimately, the unique Liferay DXP Development Environment provides high fault tolerance and flexibility performance features with an architecture that is also scalable. Remember, the architecture consists of various tiers.
Including:
- Firewall: Intrusion detection and prevention
- Load Balancer Tier: Ensures smooth distribution of load between multiple web server resources
- Web Server Tier: Delivers static content like images, rich media, CSS files, etc. It also provides integration modules to single sign-on solutions like CA SiteMinder, Oracle Identity, Ping, etc.
- Application Tier: Hosts Liferay DXP-supported application servers like Tomcat, JBoss, Oracle Weblogic, and IBM WebSphere (please see Liferay DXP 7.0 Compatibility Matrix for additional platforms). It also hosts search engines like Solr and Elasticsearch.
- Database Tier: Hosts Liferay DXP-supported database servers like MySQL Database, Oracle, MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, and PostgreSQL (please see Liferay DXP 7.0 Compatibility Matrix for additional platforms)
The hardware deployed within each tier varies depending on the type of transaction. Note that there are 2 ways to activate your Liferay DXP instance.
They are as follows:
- With an XML activation key that you request and receive from Liferay Support.
- Online activation is available through Liferay Connected Services (LCS). Liferay DXP 7.0 introduced LCS as a way to activate Liferay DXP instances. LCS can also install fix packs, monitor each instance’s performance, and help administrators manage Liferay DXP subscriptions automatically. See the LCS Documentation for instructions on activating your instances with LCS.
Note: You must use LCS to activate containerized instances, cloud deployments, and instances that use Liferay Analytics Cloud and elastic subscriptions. Otherwise, you don’t have to use LCS for activation. Instead, request an XML activation key from Liferay Support.
Finally, once you have Liferay DXP installed, it’s time to configure it to the specifics of your environment. This means setting the time zone and language, selecting your document repository type, setting up security, tuning, and more (here are more details). Likewise, you can also read on to know how to keep your system running well and how to back up a Liferay DXP Installation in detail.
The Main Ways Liferay DXP Development Process Saves You Money And Time
Markedly, the supported OSes, application servers, databases, and other environments are always available on the Customer Portal under the Support Matrix links. Secondly, Liferay takes security very seriously. One thing is sure: The Liferay DXP tool has established several procedures to ensure that Liferay DXP is as secure as possible. First of all, Liferay DXP is an open-source product.
Liferay encourages security-minded community members to verify the product they’re using. All Liferay users benefit when even a few don’t blindly trust the provider! Applications developed by Liferay, such as Audience Targeting, are available through the Liferay Marketplace and other related resource centers. Some of these applications may be supported only in specific environments.
This’s always specified in the application’s description. If you plan to use these additional products, ensure Liferay DXP runs on a supported environment before installing one of these applications. Below are a few ways the Liferay DXP Development Process helps.
1. Achieving more output with less time and money
While the reference architecture describes a physical deployment, the same concepts may be applied to a cloud-based or virtualized deployment. Many Liferay DXP customers choose to deploy on public clouds (e.g., Amazon EC2) or their private clouds (e.g., VMWare VSX-based private cloud). Appropriate quantities of virtual machines can replace physical machines.
In virtualized deployments, it is critical to allocate sufficient CPU resources. For instance, for systems deployed to Amazon AWS, CPUs are calculated using Amazon EC2 Compute Units. However, 1 Compute Unit does not equal 1 physical CPU or even 1 core on a CPU.
In Amazon’s terms, each application server equates to roughly a “Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large Instance,” or 33.5 EC2 Compute Units. Thus, to plan the virtualized / cloud deployment properly, customers must account not only for virtualization overhead but also for allocating sufficient CPU resources.
2. CMS, Collaboration, and Social Networking are all built-in
Liferay has always been regarded for providing a lot of capability right out of the box. Liferay has adopted the strategy of offering people the instant solutions they require for their web-based apps inside a portal framework that provides long-term integration and reusability benefits. Usually, most Liferay Portal Development Company customers may implement a solution support panel.
It may be for online publication or quick collaboration (in as little as a week to 3 months) by using an agile methodology or phased development technique and following up with short project iterations to add further components.
3. Web-based architecture and lightweight integration
Many individuals are touting the benefits of “Web-oriented architecture,” which eliminates some overhead associated with heavier SOA tools and protocols such as SOAP web services, governance tools, and ESBs. As a result, several Liferay clients use widgets and RSS, XML, and JSON data sources in conjunction with the pre-built portlets, such as Google Maps, in their design projects.
With the help of mashups, widgets, and other features, you may export portlets as Facebook apps and import iGoogle gadgets and iPhone webpages. These mashup-oriented solutions are surprisingly effective for specific use cases and require minimal expenditure.
4. Fault tolerance development environments
The reference architecture is fault-tolerant at every level. With clusters at the web, application, and database tier, you may suffer a catastrophic hardware failure of any node and continue to serve users with negligible performance degradation. The depicted reference architecture represents the minimum deployment units to ensure proper fault tolerance within a single data center.
You may increase the number of servers within each tier according to your load patterns to achieve a multiplier effect in the number of users the deployment can support while maintaining sufficient fault tolerance. Multi-data-center fault-tolerant architectures are not provided as part of the reference architecture.
5. Use existing resources and software performance
Liferay is known for its compatibility with infrastructure software such as Oracle DB, MySQL, WebLogic, Oracle AS, and more. It leads to lower ancillary costs and low acquisition costs due to the open-source license. Liferay installation by Liferay consulting services is possible if the licensees for the above-mentioned products are available, not to mention saving in training costs since employees are familiar with this in-house product.
Each deployment’s performance characteristics vary depending on the activity type and custom application elements’ performance. Liferay Engineering has created a series of scenarios to benchmark Liferay DXP 7.0’s out-of-the-box performance characteristics for content management, collaboration, and social enterprise scenarios.
Results from these reference architectures have indicated Liferay DXP 7.0 can support over 22,000 virtual collaboration users and over 150,000 logins per minute with an average login time of 300 milliseconds. Liferay DXP 7.0 accomplished this load within the reference architecture while using no more than 40% of CPU resources in the Web Tier, 86% of CPU resources in the Application Tier, and 50% of CPU resources in the Database Tier.
6. Reduce capital expenditures while saving on operational costs
We should all be aware of the open-source savings equation by now, but here is a more tangible estimate. We studied a sample of our clients from the second half of 2008 and determined that they saved an average of 93% above IBM and Oracle retail rates in their first year. Of course, Liferay eliminates the capital cost component of the equation, but there are yearly subscription choices.
They start at less than a few thousand dollars per server yearly, and you have four different SLA options. If you do not want 24/ 7 assistance, you may choose a lower-cost plan offered by a Liferay portal development company. However, round-the-clock coverage is still available for your mission-critical installations.
7. Create a solution that works for your company
One of the reasons why their clients continue to prefer Liferay over other point solutions for CMS, social networking, blogs, wikis, forums, and instant messaging is their flexibility to modify and integrate Liferay into their organization. For example, one of their clients began utilizing Liferay with an SSO solution in several famous forums and Wiki providers.
However, in phase two, they plan to migrate everything into Liferay to personalize the user experience for their business needs. In this scenario, they are boosting revenue by shortening their solution partners’ time to market, which enhances sales revenue.
8. Limitless scalability and security measures
Liferay Engineering’s testing has shown Liferay DXP 7.0 to scale linearly. Thus, if you know a single application server supports X virtual users and assumes sufficient database and web server resources, you may calculate the total number of application servers required. The firewall preceding the Load Balancer Tier provides adequate intrusion detection and prevention.
However, depending on your organization’s information security requirements, you may introduce additional firewall layers between each tier to secure the infrastructure further.
9. Innovation, maintenance, and security
Because of Liferay’s open-source strategy, which is among the most open even among OSS providers, you may expect to gain from additional features, greater security, and lower maintenance costs in the long run. Furthermore, many of Liferay’s features are sponsored by customers, which implies that they pay to create features that answer their business needs and benefit other users.
Liferay, in turn, commits to maintaining that code in perpetuity, lowering the sponsoring client’s maintenance costs. Other users and customers may benefit from the new features, which can be improved and multiplied to benefit all parties.
10. Lower your application’s total cost of ownership during its lifetime
Reduced capital expenditures are lovely, but a recent Gartner analysis pointed out that simply spreading your costs to other locations is insufficient. Liferay, fortunately, is also less expensive to maintain over time. For WebCenter Suite, for example, Oracle’s yearly maintenance expenses are 11 times more than our retail pricing per server for the highest level of support.
You should also consider the lower maintenance expenses for bespoke features if you have a Liferay-sponsored development agreement with a Liferay consulting company and the lower extra maintenance costs for supporting infrastructure.
In Conclusion;
Choosing open-source software with costs in mind can be difficult because developing a web portal also depends on various other business factors. But more importantly, it isn’t brilliant to make cost-based decisions today only to lose out on future competitiveness and revenue streams. Liferay’s customers have been savvy about their savings—they are investing in their futures with Liferay.
For your information, the Liferay Platform can be a headless platform to develop web or mobile apps with any technology you choose (Angular, React, Backbone, Cocoa, Android’s Material Design components, Apache Cordova, etc). In addition, it can also be used as a web integration layer, leveraging technologies such as portlets to allow several applications to coexist on the same webpage.
Given its open-source software, this is a perspective you should take to any open-source software you are evaluating today. Remember, once you have a Liferay DXP installation, there are some things you must do to keep it running smoothly. Backing up your installation in case of a hardware failure protects your data and helps you get your system back in working order quickly.
And if you’re a DXP customer, patching your system regularly brings the latest bug fixes to your running instance. Upgrading Liferay DXP 7.0 to a new GA version requires a data upgrade on your customer side. Until you perform all the necessary data upgrades (if any), the Liferay DXP startup will fail with messages displayed on your user interface. Visit their Help Center for more help.
