title: Alternative to Liferay/JSR 168 and 286 Portals?
body: <p>My team has been writing a dashboard application using Node.js, Twitter Boostrap, Mongo DB, and Mule for an ESB.</p>
  
  <p>Recently an executive asked us to change our approach to a Portal/Portlet container like Liferay.</p>
  
  <p>Some of us on the team have experience with Liferay, and we have pretty negative feelings about it.  Dealing with things like full-page refreshes, portlet lifecycles, style and theming issues, and limited DBMS coverage are at the top of our list of complaints.</p>
  
  <p>We see where our executive team is coming from.  They have decided that they want to make the dashboard extensible and easy or easier to plug into for other groups.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a solution out there which can balance the modern web expectations of users with the enterprise needs of IT professionals and executives concerned with building and extensible application with something like Liferay?  Pluggable widgets are important here.</p>
  
  <p>Node would obviously be our preference with something like Grails as a close second.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,</p>