Installing Liferay on a MacBook Pro

I tried installing Liferay as described in the admin manual but it did not work!! Then I decided to do an another clean install. Then I noticed, I had a previous instal of Tomcat on my machine and some residual environment variables. Once I cleaned it up, everything worked like a charm. Here are the steps I took:

1. Download the liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1 and uncompress and inflate it into a directory.

2. cd to bin directory and issue ./startup.sh

thats it, the server stated. I was able to login to the lifray portal from a Safari browser http://localhost:8080.

Go to logs directory and tail the catalina.out and check out the logs, it should say "INFO: Server startup in 33424 ms" as an evidence that the server stated up.

Next step for me is to install a developer version of Liferay so I can start developing Portlets.

Exploring Portlet servers

I am exploring opensource portlet servers for one of the projects CircleSource working on. This project is in the health care domain to develop KPI(Key performance Indicators) for hospitals. 

We hvae explored JBoss portal server and we found it has some limitations for what we were trying to do. We are now exploring Liferay  portal server. From what I read on their web site and other reviews, it looks like the best choice for a portal/portlet development. What also impressed me is the response from the development team. Like any other project in IT, I am in a very tight schedule, so instead of me exploring the portal server, I thought I buy some consulting hours from the Liferay team and I wrote an exploratory e-mail to sales@liferay.com and it was a Saturday and I got a response with couple of hours and in next few exchanges we even set up a conference call to discuss our requirements with the team and how they can help us. That sounds very encouraging. So, I will continue to post my experiences here.

In the mean time, I want to be able to install Liferay on my machine. I have a MacBook Pro mchine running leopard and I am very proud of it. I am going to be installing Liferay on this machine. I have spent some time on this already and have not been able to install it successful. It looks simple but i think I am making some mistakes. I have started fresh now and started the download of the bundle form the Liferay site. I will continue to post my experience here. Stay tuned.