As the press release says, now it is official: "Liferay, Inc., provider of leading open source enterprise portal and collaboration software, and IT Mill Ltd., provider of the Vaadin rich user interface library, recently announced a new technology partnership. The collaboration will simplify and reduce the cost of developing sophisticated and secure rich user interfaces for Liferay-based enterprise applications."
What does this mean in practice for a Liferay and/or Vaadin developer? Simply, it means an easy way of building rich web applications on top of Liferay platform.
We have been working on Vaadin portlet integration for some time now and Vaadin-based portlets run nicely on Liferay. Read Teemu's article about how to get started today! If you are using Eclipse download the plugin and startup Liferay - Your first application is nearly deployed.
The upcoming Liferay 5.3 will introduce more seamless integration of Vaadin applications. Better portlet commmunication and full support for installing and running multiple rich portlets in Liferay portal environment.
For those only interested in seeing what this looks like, and what kind of applications you can build with Vaadin-Liferay combo, take a look at the tech demo of new Mail Portlet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8gHh_UpuDw