Liferay and ICEfaces Announce Ajax Portal Technology Partnership

July 24, 2007; 02:41 AM
Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class, open source portal and content management system, announced a new technology partnership with ICEsoft Technologies. ICEsoft is the creator and provider of ICEfaces, the leading open source framework for simplified development of Ajax-enabled Java EE applications that are rich, robust, secure, and scalable. The integration of ICEfaces with Liferay Portal now allows enterprise developers to draw on the power of Ajax technology to provide visually rich, highly responsive experiences for users.

“ICEfaces technology raises the bar for creating intuitive and usable portal user interfaces,” said Liferay’s Chief Software Architect, Brian Chan, “We specifically integrated with ICEfaces because they are the best at what they do and will have the highest impact on both the user and the developer experience.”

ICEfaces extends JavaServer™ Faces (JSF), providing transparent Ajax capabilities while preserving the server-side Java EE programming model, and eliminating the need for low-level JavaScript development. With this partnership, developers can now leverage Ajax Push within Liferay Portal, which allows presentation changes to be asynchronously pushed from the application server to individual portlets. Furthermore, the Liferay Portal and ICEfaces integration bears significance for the portal market as a whole. Due to limited integration between Ajax and JSF in a portal environment in the past, the benefits of JSF have not been widely leveraged by portal developers. This relationship addresses the complexities of Ajax development in a portal environment.

“Without a doubt, Liferay Portal now provides the richest feature set in the industry,” said Stephen Maryka, CTO at ICEsoft. “The collaborative efforts of the Liferay and ICEfaces development teams have addressed the complexities of incorporating JSF and Ajax in Portals, allowing the developer to focus on the creative aspects of rich portal development. I expect the partnership and integration between Liferay Portal and ICEfaces to be a major catalyst in boosting JSF adoption in portal environments.”

Most recently, Kofax, the market leader and de facto standard in capture application software, leveraged the benefits of the Liferay Portal and ICEfaces relationship. “We believe Liferay and ICEfaces provide the best way to build content-rich portals with an SOA architecture. Kofax selected these technologies to build powerful solutions that will fit into any of our customer's enterprises," said VP of Engineering, Sameer Samat.

Liferay Portal 4.3.0 and ICEfaces 1.6.0 are both available for immediate download and mark the first of many synergistic technology releases for both companies. “The Liferay team is very happy with our partnership with ICEsoft and its impact on the developer landscape,” said Chan, “We look forward to seeing even more fruits of this relationship forwarding in the future.” Upcoming releases will see a number of Liferay’s over 60 out-of-the-box portlets rebuilt to leverage the ICEfaces Ajax framework and component suite.

For more about Liferay Portal, visit www.liferay.com. Additional information about ICEfaces can be found at www.icefaces.org. Detailed information on using ICEfaces with Liferay Portal is available in Liferay Portal 4.3.0 documentation.

About Liferay:

Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework with Fortune 500 clients in the U.S. and Europe. Liferay Professional Services offers technical support, custom development and professional training to ensure successful deployment of its flagship product in the most demanding IT environments. Liferay clients include Discovery Education, Goodwill Industries, and the Christian Science Monitor. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles. For more information, please visit www.liferay.com.

About ICEsoft Technologies Inc.

ICEsoft Technologies, Inc., is a leading provider of standards-compliant, Ajax-based solutions for developing and deploying Java EE, rich Internet applications. The company's portfolio of enterprise level Java products includes ICEfaces, an Ajax application framework that enables Java EE application developers to easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in pure Java. Visit www.icesoft.com.