BeSafe Technologies Inc.

This past April BeSafe provided the opportunity for me to attend a 3 day Liferay training course for Java developers. The class was administered by Rivit Logic in its Reston, Virginia, offices. Rivit Logic is a Liferay Service Partner. The course content is developed by and copyrighted by Liferay.

Liferay Standard Edition provides a really incredible set of capabilities. Because of this very richness, it can be an incredibly complex development platform. This is after all, a Java Servlet and Portlet based application built on top of several open source projects. Complexity just comes with this territory. Fortunately Liferay, in partnership with their training partners, offers these classes to help get you up to speed.

I'm not an experienced Java programer, and I expected that much of the material covered would be over my head, and it was. But the class is structured such that clear examples are provided for each topic covered, and even though I may not have understood all the details I was able to follow the topics and gain an understanding of the Liferay way of doing things, which was my main goal in attending. All the course presentations, example code, and tools used, (Eclipse and some third party Java libraries) are provided to you electronically. These materials allow you to review the class topics at your own pace and have been a great help.

I think the course could easily be expanded to 4 days given the broad range of topics covered, or even 5 with the addition of some portal administration topics. I have no problem at all recommending this class as a very good overview of developing applications (portlets and themes) for the Liferay portal.