Josh Asbury presented Liferay’s mobile capabilities this afternoon. Josh is Director of Corporate Sales for Liferay.
If you done any work on the mobile front, you know there are basically three approaches to mobile-enable your websites:
- Responsive Design – works on most devices and lower implementation costs, but can’t take advantage of the device features and doesn’t optimize image sizes.
- Native – provides access to device specific features, but requires development for a variety of devices
- Hybrid – device neutral so you can write once and deploy everywhere, but still requires some native code.
From Liferay’s point of view, they have several key features that can enable a robust mobile platform:
- Device Detection & Processing – Liferay is about to release WURFL, which does device detection. You build mobile device rules to describe device capabilities and then define how to act on this information. Here is a video that explains this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-m2wQt9vnZ4
- Site Management – build pages and manage hierarchy. You can build multiple sites in Liferay, including mobile specific sites. You can have one site also.
- UI Component Toolkit – AlloyUI is embedded, but you can include your own such as jQuery, Ext-JS, YUI, etc. Mobile themes can be built to make sure the right components are displayed.
- Centralized Content Repository – all content is stored in Liferay, including web content, social content, collaboration content, and enterprise content. The same security and localization rules apply to all the content.
- Web Services Exposure – Hybrid and native applications require services based access. Liferay has JSON web services for all documents, we content, profile, etc. In Liferay 6.2, they will provide OAuth for all web services.
Liferay doesn’t produce a native mobile application or a hybrid application. You can build these types of mobile applications with Liferay by using third party tools.
