• Content Aggregation -  A single Web page within the application aggregates the output or user interface of several data sources or applications.
• Personalization - Users or administrators of the portal can customize the user interface. This often means not only customizing the look and feel, but also selecting a certain set of available functionalities within the application.
• Single Sign-On - The user logs in only once to access several applications in the portal.

• Separation of faceless actions from rendering - Orbeon Forms allows actions to generate output while still adhering to the Java Portlet specification. Developers are obviously free to only write faceless actions. In the Page Flow Controller, such actions end with a <result page="some-page-id"> directive.
• Getting rid of the familiar concept of URL path - Orbeon Forms abstracts this behavior and provides Orbeon Forms Portlet developers with the notion of a path, implicitly in the Web Application Controller, or explicitly with the Request Generator, while still adhering to the Java Portlet specification.
• Getting rid of the familiar concept of URL redirection - Instead, portlet actions can set parameters to use in subsequent portlet rendering. Orbeon Forms abstracts this behavior and provides, indirectly in the Page Flow Controller, or explicitly with the Redirect Processor, the notion of redirecting to another page within the portlet.
• Calling APIs to generate URLs - Orbeon Forms handles this by providing automatic URL rewriting.
• Generating Markup Fragments - The default Orbeon Forms epilogue automatically extracts a fragment from a Orbeon Forms <d:document>. This allows pages to remain unmodified for both servlet and portlet deployment. The default epilogue also makes sure that no HTML or XML DOCTYPE is generated at the beginning of a fragment. The default epilogue can easily be modified.

1. Only for Liferay 5 [NOTE: For Orbeon Forms builds before  February 4, 2009] (skip this step if you are using Liferay 4 or Orbeon Forms builds after February 4, 2009)
   
   
   1. Uncompress the orbeon.war in a temporary directory.
   2. Open WEB-INF/web.xml in an editor.
   3. Uncomment the code between "Uncomment this for the context listener processors" and "End context listener processors".
   4. Uncomment the <listener> which references org.orbeon.oxf.webapp.OPSServletContextListenerDelegate.
   5. Compress back the data you have extracted to recreate the orbeon.war with this modified web.xml.
   
   For information on why this is needed on Liferay 5, see note 1 below.
   
   
2. Set larger MaxPermSize (optional) - Depending on your system, you might get an error when starting Liferay, or later one when using Liferay, telling you that the Java VM ran out of PermGen space. You can prevent this error by setting the value of MaxPermSize to a value larger than the default value, for instance by declaring the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in a way similar what is is done below. The declaration of JAVA_OPTS can be done at the beginning of bin/setclasspath.sh (or if on Windows, the equivalent line at the beginning of bin/setclasspath.bat):
   
       JAVA_OPTS="-server -verbosegc -Xms386m -Xmx386m -Djava.awt.headless=true -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"
   
   
3. Deploy orbeon.war - Start Liferay. When it is fully started move the orbeon.war into the Liferay deploy directory (e.g. ~/liferay/deploy). At this point, you should see message indicating that Orbeon is being deployed. Monitor the Liferay output as well as the logs/orbeon.log for possible errors.
   
   
4. Enable dynamic resource reloading (optional) - Remove the file webapps/orbeon/META-INF/context.xml and restart Liferay. For more information on what this does, see note 2 below.
   
   
5. Configuration for Form Runner and Form Builder (optional) - You can skip this step if you do not intend to use Form Runner or Form Builder in a portlet. Otherwise, create a file WEB-INF/resources/config/properties-local.xml which declares the following property:
   
       <properties xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
                   xmlns:oxf="http://www.orbeon.com/oxf/processors">
           <property as="xs:anyURI"  name="oxf.fr.appserver.uri" value="http://localhost:8080/orbeon"/>
       </properties>
   
   
6. Add the Orbeon Forms portlet - Log into the portal, go to Add Application, and if the deployment of Orbeon Forms was successful you will see:
   
   

   
   
   Click the Add link or drag and drop Orbeon Forms Portlet where you want the portlet to be inserted into the page. Those links are defined in WEB-INF/resources/apps/portlet-welcome/view.xhtml.
   
   

   

1. While Liferay 4 lazy loads portlets, but, because of performance related issues, Liferay 5 is aggressively loading portlets when the web application is being deployed. So with Liferay 5, the initialization order is as follows:
   
   
   1. Servlet context listeners are initialized.
   2. Portlets are initialized.
   3. Servlets are initialized.
   
   For the Orbeon Forms portlet to be able to run, code which is executed by either the Orbeon Forms servlet context listener, or the Orbeon Forms servlet needs to run first. Since servlets are initialized after portlets, the only option is to have this code executed from the servlet context listener.
   
   NOTE: By default, the Orbeon Forms servlet context listener is enabled for Orbeon Forms builds after Febuary 4, 2009.
   
   
2. When Liferay deploys Orbeon Forms, it changes some of the descriptors and adds a META-INF/context.xml which is not present in the distribution of Orbeon Forms. This file contains:
   
       <Context antiJARLocking="true" antiResourceLocking="true"/>
   
   which causes Tomcat to, on startup, make a copy of the Orbeon web application into its temp directory and use that copy instead of the files under webapps/orbeon. That copy is removed when the server shuts down, and will be done again the next time the server is started. This makes starting Liferay slower, but more importantly this means that changes you make to files under webapps/orbeon after the server started will never be picked up. So any modification to the resources (WEB-INF/resources) of your application will require a restart of Liferay. This  can be quite very time consuming and annoying, hence our recommendation to remove the META-INF/context.xml generated by Liferay..

Jetspeed 2 based portals

1. Deploy Orbeon.war
   
   a) On Tomcat - If your Jetspeed portal runs on Tomcat (like when having used the installer), the easiest way is to let Jetspeed deploy Orbeon by copying orbeon.war to Jetspeed's deploy directory  webapps/jetspeed/WEB-INF/deploy.  Auto-deployment will take place directly if the portal is running, otherwise at startup.
   
   b) Other - On application servers other than Tomcat, use your application server's own deployment mechanism to deploy Orbeon as web application.
   
   The following servlet is to be inserted into Orbeon's web.xml
   
   <servlet>
      <servlet-name>JetspeedContainer</servlet-name>
      <display-name>Jetspeed Container</display-name>
      <description>MVC Servlet for Jetspeed Portlet Applications</description>
      <servlet-class>org.apache.jetspeed.container.JetspeedContainerServlet</servlet-class>
      <init-param>
        <param-name>contextName</param-name>
        <param-value>orbeon</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <load-on-startup>[your-value]</load-on-startup>
   </servlet>
   <servlet-mapping>
      <servlet-name>JetspeedContainer</servlet-name>
      <url-pattern>/container/*</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>
   
   With this setup Orbeon will register itself as portlet application to Jetspeed.
   
   
2. Add Orbeon's portlet on your page
   
   To add Orbeon's portlet called OrbeonFormsPortlet to a page, adjust the desired .psml page to incorporate this portlet in a fragment, e.g. 
   <fragment id="yourId" type="portlet" name="orbeon::OrbeonFormsPortlet">
   
   This can also be accomplished using a UI with the Edit page functionality when logged in as admin.

1. First setup and run the portal normally and check that you get the portal first page OK at http://localhost:8080/portal.
2. Download a nightly build of Orbeon Forms, and add the following files inside the WEB-INF directory:
   
   portlet-instances.xml:
   
   <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
   <!DOCTYPE deployments PUBLIC
     "-//JBoss Portal//DTD Portlet Instances 2.6//EN"
     "http://www.jboss.org/portal/dtd/portlet-instances_2_6.dtd">
   <deployments>
     <deployment>
        <instance>
           <instance-id>OrbeonPortletInstance</instance-id>
           <portlet-ref>OrbeonFormsPortlet</portlet-ref>
        </instance>
     </deployment>
   </deployments>
   
   orbeon-object.xml:
   
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!DOCTYPE deployments PUBLIC
     "-//JBoss Portal//DTD Portal Object 2.6//EN"
     "http://www.jboss.org/portal/dtd/portal-object_2_6.dtd">
   <deployments>
     <deployment>
        <parent-ref>default.default</parent-ref>
        <if-exists>overwrite</if-exists>
        <window>
           <window-name>Orbeon Forms</window-name>
           <content>
            <content-type>portlet</content-type>
            <content-uri>OrbeonPortletInstance</content-uri>
           </content>
           <region>center</region>
           <height>1</height>
        </window>
     </deployment>
   </deployments>
   
   
3. Uncomment the following in the web.xml, since resource is present in jboss-web.xml file:
   
      <!-- Uncomment this for the SQL examples -->
      <resource-ref>
          <description>DataSource</description>
          <res-ref-name>jdbc/db</res-ref-name>
          <res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>
          <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
      </resource-ref>
   
   
4. Deploy modified WAR to $JBOSS_PORTAL_DIR/server/default/deploy
5. The deployer should automatically deploy the WAR and if you refresh the first page on the portal, you will see that the orbeon portlet view has appeared on the page. Check the terminal or logs for issues during deployment if you have some problems.

•  org.orbeon.oxf.portlet.OrbeonPortletDelegate for Portlet 1 (JSR-168) Orbeon Forms Portlets 
•  org.orbeon.oxf.portlet.OrbeonPortlet2Delegate for Portlet 2 (JSR-268) Orbeon Forms Portlets