See Making Liferay Social – Opensocial.

This will provide the same light, RAD + runtime environment that is so popular in current social network environments.

With a platform like Liferay, you can have 168 server side integration and light weight JavaScript integration.

For my point of view, the main advantage of portaneo is that it supports very lightweigth devlopment standard to create new widgets (e.g. a 99% igoogle compliant XHTML grammar).

Compared to JSR168 portlets, which are pure java developpers stuff, widgets (implementing UWA, google gadget, Opera widget 1.0 or whatever) are very demorcatic and empowers a hudge HTML/JS community to extend portal functonality.

So this is not about Java vs PHP, but about Portlets vs Widgets. And, as portlets have proven to be disapointing …

Liferay is a good example: the platform is excellent (user management, performance,design, …), widely used, but when you find thousands of user-crated widgets on Netvibes or iGoogle, you find only a dozen on Liferay!

So if the PersonALL solution reconciles (X)HTML/JS widget approach and the Java world, this is the product we expected for a while. so, WE WANT TO KNOW MORE! personall.fr is beatiful and very didactic, but we miss actual technical and commercial info!

At PersonAll we all strongly believe in personalisized pages and we want to offer their benefits in organizational contexts (Enterprise 2.0 approach), ie with a stronger security and client ownership approach. My previous experience at IBM and Google Professional Apps, and the one of the other founders made us choose a non Open-Source approach. After a long debate.

1) Managing an open-source community is a hard and consuming work.

2) Personalised pages are simple and stable tools in itself that do not necessary require wisdom of the crowd on its core, the value we focus on is:
* Mapping and organizing existing information to deliver it with relevance.
* Widgets and portlets: the more compatible widgets, the more relevant the personalized pages. That is where commuity work is helpful. We pay careful attention to the evolution of widgets standards in order to have our product open to a variety of third-party applications.
This is the type of value we want to bring to customers and partners.

3) Our solutions are Java-based, which is not the case of Portaneo Gaston. Experience shows that acceptance behind the firewall is higher when the product is Java, rather than PHP. Java is also helpful for our open widget strategy thanks to the JSR 168 norm.

4) Existing portals (such as LifeRay), even with user customisation, often require heavy implementation phase. Not all companies can afford this. We wanted to keep the spirit of web 2.0 by creating a product that is simple to work with on the user end, and simple to implement on the technical end.

Thanks again Jason!