Liferay, a provider of open source enterprise portal and collaboration software, and IT Mill, a provider of the Vaadin rich user interface library, have entered into a new technology partnership to reduce the cost of developing rich user interfaces for Liferay-based enterprise applications.

As a result of the partnership, the Vaadin library will be bundled with future Liferay software releases and be used to create rich interfaces for existing Liferay functionality such as webmail, content management, collaboration, and social networking.

According to the companies, developers will be able to take advantage of integrated tooling for Eclipse and use Vaadin components when creating new Liferay applications.

Joonas Lehtinen, CEO of IT Mill, said: Liferay has become the leading independent, open source platform for building web applications to solve business problems in many industries.

This is not surprising as its combination of an extensible, feature-rich platform and business-friendly licensing is unmatched in the market. We look forward to partnering with a team that shares our dedication to usability and has the enterprise market footprint to maximise the impact of Vaadin technology.”

The companies claim that with Liferay and Vaadin, enterprises can develop secure applications that work like desktop applications to increase productivity and user adoption.

The companies added that the Apache-licensed Vaadin is based on Google Web Toolkit technology, but differentiates itself with a secure server-side development model. With Vaadin, developers can utilise AJAX without knowing HTML or JavaScript or requiring users to install any browser plug-ins.

Brian Chan, chief software architect of Liferay, said: We have used many great tools for creating AJAX-enriched web applications. However, Vaadin is unique in taking a Java-friendly approach to help companies use existing engineering resources to create enterprise-worthy applications that are secure and easy to use.”