Liferay is one of the most popular JSR compliant open source portal. This can be used to drive multiple websites with the variety of features and look and feel. Liferay is developed in Java and the major portlet development on it is also supported by Java and few other languages.
I have worked on Liferay for more than 3 years and found that following interview questions are must know before getting a decent Liferay developer job.
1) What are the various ways in which you can customize the default behavior of Liferay that ships to you?
2) What is the difference between a Liferay Hook and Liferay EXT?
3) Suppose I want to customize the behavior of Calendar portal that comes out of the box with Liferay, how can I do that?
4) How will you configure Liferay to authenticate users from LDAP?
5) What is inter-portlet communication and how can that be achieved?
6) What is the difference between view and edit modes of a portlet?
7) What is service.xml and how will you use Liferay service builder?
8 ) Suppose I have a portlet written for Liferay 6.1 and I want to run it on Liferay 6.2, how can I do that? What if I get some spring and hibernate related exceptions with Liferay 6?
9) There is a requirement from the client that out of 4 portlets that you have written only 2 should be visible to a particular category of users. How will you achieve that? What if some fields in the remaining 2 portlets have also to be controlled based on user role?
10) What is the purpose of portal-ext.properties?
11) What steps will you follow to change the layout and theme of the portal pages?
12) Suppose I want to change the background color of the footer in Liferay, what steps should I follow?
13) Which JSR is being implemented by Liferay?
14) What improvements would you like to see in Liferay 6 portal?
15) There are 1000 users using the portlet developed by you, how will you take care of transaction management.
16) A client has two different portal applications for Sales and HR department. The client wants to run these portal applications on the same server but with separate URLs like http://:/sales and http://:/hr. How will you achieve that?
17) What are the minimum Java methods one needs to override in order to write a portlet?
18) How will you make the user go from one JSP to another JSP page in a portlet?
19) While building a service using service builder, what is the purpose of specifying remoteservice=true in service.xml?
20) How to control the category in which the Liferay portlet created by me will be displayed?
21) What is hot deployment feature of Liferay? Where will you place your portlets for them to be deployed without server restart?
22) Does Liferay support email notifications out of the box for portlets involving workflow?
23) What is the purpose of mode and persistence packages which are created by the Liferay service builder?
24) If there are 3 portlets and all of them need to talk to different database systems (say MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server) because of some legacy application requirements. How will you make them connect to different databases?
25) Can you configure the database connection pool created by Liferay?
26) Can you list down various tools and frameworks used by Liferay? e.g. It uses Lucene for search
27) Suppose a client is pursuing a Liferay based solution to their requirements, what non-functional clarifications will you ask the customer?
28) Is there a build number associated with a portlet assigned by the service builder? Where can we find the current build number?
29) Have you tried the Liferay 6 Eclipse plugin? What all limitations have you found?
30) How do you log events in a portlet? Do I need to configure Log4J for every portlet or is there a common place where one can configure Log4J so that all Liferay portlets can use logging API?
31) Do you know how to update your setup of Liferay 6.1 to Liferay 6.2?
32) Can I run my Struts 1.3 based legacy application as a portlet application? How?
33) Is it a good design to meet the customer requirements by creating a single portlet or splitting them into multiple portlets? What criteria will you use to split the functionality into multiple portlets?
34) What advantages do you see in running the Liferay portal application on an application server like JBoss than running it on a web server like Tomcat?
35) What all other portals have you heard of? How do you compare them to Liferay?
36) How will you implement i18 in a portal application? What if you want the user to choose his language preference?
37) There is a portlet application for managing images similar to Flickr. The user wants to see the images on the full screen. Will Liferay allow you to do that?
38) I have a war file of the portlet which is created using service builder, what is the difference between pasting this war file in the deploy folder of Liferay and application folder of the server (like web apps in case of Tomcat)?
39) How will you set-up a clustered Liferay portal on 5 servers available to you?
40) How much user base can Liferay support without affecting performance?
41) There is a JRE shipped with Liferay package, do we not need a JDK and what is the purpose of bundled JRE?
42) Suppose there is a requirement from client to implement search functionality in Liferay portlet, does Liferay provides any API out of the box to support search?
43) What are the various ways in which one can override the default behaviour of Liferay?
44) The service builder can also build WSDL for you. What is the benefit of this feature provided by Liferay?
45) How will you build a portlet that can be added only single or multiple times in to the portal application?
46) Is it possible to set a session time out for a portlet which is different from other portlets and the Liferay portal?
47) What is the flow of HTTP request in Liferay?
48) The JSPPortlet.java extends the MVCPortlet.java class. What purpose does MVCPortlet.java fulfill?
49) How do you perform Junit tests on your portlet? How do tackle the dependency on the MVCPortlet.java?
50) Is it mandatory to have the view logic in view.jsp? Can one configure some other JSP (say MyJSP.jsp) to be default view page than view.jsp?
