Hi all,

There's some talk in the company I work in of creating an intranet built on top of one of the portals such as JetSpeed, Liferay, or any other, nothing is decided in that area.

I'm a long serving servlet-webapp developer but I've not had any experience with portal development, so I was hoping some of you kind seasoned portal developers could help shed some light on what portal makes for a good environment, with particular emphasis on how easy it is in day-to-day use for a developer?

For example, is one particularly easy or hard to get to mesh with your build tools, or does one have a much quicker deploy-code-deploy turnaround time?

Not all of these specifics may help, but just in case, it'd be likely we'd use the portal along with our pretty much standard dev environment:

- Eclipse
- Maven 2
- Jetty (and Tomcat for production environment)
- Selenium
- Some apps are Ajax-heavy - using prototypejs and GWT
- Spring
- Acegi
- Hibernate
- JSP for views
- Velocity for emails
- MySQL and Oracle

Looking forward to your responses, thanks in advance,

Eliot