Liferay and ICEsoft team up to take Ajax to the enterprise

Building mashups is all very well, but the bigger the organisation requiring them the more complicated it can get to create them, particularly if there is a strong need to maintain enterprise programming models.

This is the target of a technology collaboration that brings together Liferay and ICEfaces to create a combined set of tools aimed at enterprise developers looking to add Ajax technology to their applications.

The collaboration brings together Liferay's portal and content management system with ICEsoft Technologies' open source framework for developing Ajax-enabled Java EE applications, ICEfaces.

This takes JavaServer Faces (JSF) and adds transparent Ajax capabilities while preserving the server-side Java EE programming model. It also cuts right back on the need for enterprise developers to get involved with low-level JavaScript development.

The key advantage of the collaboration is that developers can now use Ajax Push from within Liferay Portal. This means presentation changes can be asynchronously pushed from the application server to individual portlets.

On a wider front, the two companies also feel it should improve the limited integration that has existed between Ajax and JSF in portal environments. In turn, they both hope to see a wider adoption of JSF in enterprise portal services.

Liferay Portal 4.3.0 and ICEfaces 1.6.0 are both available for immediate download from the respective companies. It is expected to be the first of several technical collaborations between the two. ®