Liferay Opens Open-Source Tools Marketplace

Liferay, maker of an enterprise-class, open-source portal, has announced the public launch of Liferay Marketplace, a new marketplace that offers more than 70 enterprise tools and apps developed by Liferay.

As part of this launch, Liferay also invites independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers to begin developing apps for Liferay Marketplace. Availability of third-party apps created by ISVs will be in the next phase of Liferay Marketplace, which will include additional functionality such as built-in transaction and payments processing, the company said.

Usability and extensibility

Liferay officials said the Liferay Marketplace extends the company’s commitment to usability and extensibility, as Liferay users can now find, review and download apps from the public repository, and then install them within their local instance of Liferay Portal. This makes customising and extending existing deployments easy and fast for both technical and nontechnical users alike.

“Liferay Marketplace supports multiple goals we have wanted to deliver over the last few years,” said Brian Chan, Liferay’s chief software architect, in a statement. “It greatly enhances our customers’ abilities to extend their existing web solutions in a manner that saves them on time and the costs associated with solution upgrades.

Also, in keeping with Liferay’s longstanding commitment to creating value for the open-source community, Liferay Marketplace aims to make it easier for a larger community of developers to share and distribute innovations as easily consumable modular applications.”

Liferay Marketplace provides ISVs a new distribution channel in presenting their enterprise apps to a global audience that includes more than 500,000 deployments of the Liferay platform around the world, Liferay officials said.

Third-party tools

In Liferay Marketplace, users get highlights of the most popular applications, quick access to app details, browse and search capabilities, and customer reviews and rankings.

Along with apps from Liferay, enterprise apps and tools developed by third parties will eventually be made available for browsing and download. ISVs have already committed to developing their own innovative apps for inclusion in Liferay Marketplace at a future date.

“The Liferay Marketplace allows anyone to have their applications be seen and deployed by our users around the world,” Chan said. “We believe this will allow Liferay and the Liferay community to deliver more innovations faster than ever before to enterprise customers.”

Are you a Firefox enthusiast? Take our quiz.