Goodbye old friends...

Alfresco and JBoss Portal have been part of OpenQuote for a long time now and both have served the project very well. But, for 2.0, the wind of change is blowing.

The decision to move away from JBoss portal was, to some extent, forced upon us. The version that we were using up to and including OpenQuote 1.4 has itself been put out to grass and replaced with a totally new implementation from eXo. The upgrade path for Alfresco was less problematic, but Alfresco has grown enormously in capability; to the point that we're only scratching the surface of it's functionality in OpenQuote.

So, the time was ripe for a review.

Two front runners came out of the review: JBoss+Liferay, and JBoss+eXo. We gave consideration to Glassfish rather than JBoss as the base JEE server, but on balance both are comparable and as we have experience of JBoss and it has served us well up to now, we chose to stick with it. Likewise, we considered building Tomcat. Taking a web container and adding the features that you need to it (transaction managers etc) is quite a common approach these days. However, in our case it seemed the simpler approach to start from a JEE server and take out what we didn't need.

So, we stuck with JBoss. Though, we are stepping up to the latest version (7.1.1). Both Liferay and eXo have pretty well built out content management systems already, so Alfresco was also out of the picture.

In the end, we chose Liferay over eXo principally because it has a larger installed base and a more active community. If I'm honest, I also found it hard at the time to draw a line between the parts of eXo that were open source and the parts that were commercial. We can't afford to find that we're dependent on a commercial system, or find that a feature that we really need is commercial only.

So, OpenQuote 2.0 is based on Liferay 6.1.1.

The improvements we've seen so far are huge! More on that as the upgrade work progresses.