> Thanks for trying Erik it's still blowing up just in a different place.  The
> exceptions are now:
>
> [GC 224999K->198874K(319040K), 0.0292890 secs]
> 07:45:35,343 ERROR [PortletServlet:96] javax.portlet.PortletException:
> java.lang.IllegalStateException: Processor execution did not return content.
> javax.portlet.PortletException: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Processor
> execution did not return content.
> at
> org.orbeon.oxf.portlet.OrbeonPortlet2Delegate.render(OrbeonPortlet2Delegate.java:242)
> at com.liferay.portlet.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:101)
>
> To be honest I think I'm at my pain threshold with the whole LifeRay/Orbeon
> integration thing I think it's time I move on.
>
> The question (honestly) is whether I move on without LifeRay or without
> Orbeon.
>
> The main thing LifeRay was bringing was the nice drag and drop portal page
> layouts with so many portlets including ones I might have used like the web
> CMS stuff, shopping cart, forums, etc.  And the role based user admin with
> the user registration and logon and stuff all built in without coding so
> much as just configuring.
>
> I know you guys mentioned you do have good integration working with TYPO3 -
> I honestly don't know anything about it.  I'm mainly a java guy though I
> have done a tiny bit of PHP recently...
>
> Is TYPO3 the only other system along these lines you guys have integrated
> with? (to be honest I googled TYPO3 and stumbled on some pretty harsh
> critiques but you know how the web can be :)  
>
> Not Drupal? Joomla?  Anything else along those lines?
>
> FWIW I think something was said about these integrations not being high on
> the Orbeon priority list but for me it would really be killer.  
>
> In particular I think Form Builder is wonderful in terms of empowering less
> technical types to be able to participate in the design/development of
> forms.  In addition to being a programmer I have a UI Design/User Centered
> Design background and this is a big thing with me - getting us technical
> types out of the way of people who know the business and/or are better
> communicators/technical writers/UI designers.  I think you guys have really
> got something great in Form Builder from that point of view.  And even just
> from the pure productivity standpoint.  I think it's wonderful.
>
> The frustration for me over LifeRay and Orbeon not being able to work
> together is mainly that LifeRay has similar strengths that you have with
> FormBuilder, in the broader realms of being able to interactively layout a
> general web site and configure and setup a lot of stuff without coding.
>
> Yet they don't have what you have in Form Builder they don't have any slick
> interactive way of creating forms and having them stored as simple XML
> (which I also love - the reason I stumbled on you guys was I've been using
> eXist for a project at work and loving the whole XML/XQuery/NoSQL
> philosophy).
>
> So it feels to my like you guys could really complement one another as a
> high productivity web development toolset if you simply had the ability to
> do the Form Runner stuff in a portlet.  I really needed a way to drop a
> portlet and configure it with that application name/form name you have
> people enter in Form Builder, and have that display the Form Runner
> summary/list thing in the portlet for that specified form.  So the
> surrounding navigation would have been LifeRay Portal Pages and you guys
> would have been doing the forms, with things like LifeRay's XSL Portlet or
> CMS Portlets etc. hitting the eXist RESTful interface for other types of
> presentation of the data the forms had entered.  
>
> Or just doing XQuery directly in eXist against the data to return HTML to
> LifeRay using it's Web Proxy portlet (I'd done examples of these different
> approaches and they'd worked fine).
>
> So displaying the list/detail for a certain type of form in a portlet would
> have been huge.  That, plus the option to actually go around the Form Runner
> summary/list page thingie and instead go straight to the specified form's
> Create or Edit mode.  To me those would haved opened a world of
> opportunities for you guys that I personally don't see in Form Builder/Form
> Runner standalone.
>
> (this last option being for cases where the Form Runner summary/list isn't
> desired or sufficient, e.g. where there might be a more customer facing
> presentation of the managed list of "data" e.g. an ecommerce catalog showing
> thumbnail images and things like that, so I would have wanted to go around
> the Form Runner summary/list page in some cases, though it would have been
> fine for a pure administrative use that wasn't customer facing).
>
> Oh well - maybe in 5 years and 5 million dollars right. :)
>
> We'll see I haven't given up yet but I'm definitely close.  
>
> I forgot to mentioned the very first thing I'd done was just use an
> IframePortlet in LifeRay pointed at Orbeon running separately.  That
> actually hadn't been awful but I just could never make it seamless - e.g. in
> several of the browsers for the life of me I could't get it to hide the
> iframe it wanted to leave these blank areas where a scrollbar would have
> been (hard to describe basically it just looked odd and I couldn't seem to
> fix it in certain browsers).  I'd ended up feeling the iframe approach was a
> hack and thought the portlet approach was the right one.
>
> So in the next attempt I'd actually gotten LifeRay's Web Proxy portlet
> looking pretty dang good for doing what I described, it was of course the
> AJAX calls back to Orbeon e.g. when you'd search and stuff that wouldn't get
> processed through the proxy stuff and wind up either blowing up or not
> working or jumping out of the portal page etc.  
>
> At the time I thought I might pursue it further, but my fear now is that
> wouldn't the enhanced solution require the same kind of
> OrbeonProxyPorlet/TrampolineServlet kind of thing that's causing problems
> for these other approaches.  I don't think I have the energy to go down
> another dead end...
>
> In the end, I kind of feel like the best most seamless reliable approach
> would be a true portlet invoking Orbeon java code to do all the magic you
> guys do under LifeRay, without it trying to proxy out to Orbeon running
> separately.  
>
> But this isn't an approach you guys have pre-packaged up to make easy, nor
> even an approach you guys advocate right...  That one page says you guys
> advocate the separate deployment approach but that doesn't seem to work at
> least not with LifeRay...
>
> Oh well wrote too much (sorry).
>
> Thanks for the help regardless.
>