DEVCON Liferay 2025: artificial intelligence at the heart of the debate

Cédric: DEVCON is a conference that brings together developers, technical managers, and Liferay's product teams. The goal is to share the roadmap, new features, upcoming features, and features that are going to be discontinued. But what makes the event so rich is the “Unconference” part: everyone can propose a topic, talk with experts, and explore specific issues in depth. It's very participatory and encourages networking.

Thomas: This format really allows us to break out of the traditional conference mold. We discuss, share our experiences, and compare our points of view. It's also an opportunity to forge links with partners from all over Europe and beyond.

Cédric: AI has been omnipresent for the past two years. There is always at least one talk on the subject, often in connection with partners such as Google or Gemini. The goal is to facilitate content generation, mock-up creation, and task automation. Semantic search, for example, allows you to find content in Liferay by asking natural questions, as with ChatGPT. It's already available in beta, but we're still waiting for user feedback for wider adoption. 

Thomas: AI is also used for machine translation. Some of our customers, who manage dozens of languages, are very interested in native integration of these tools. The results are often more relevant than with traditional tools, especially for complex multilingual needs.

Cédric: Security is a major issue. Liferay is integrating more and more native features, such as Content Security Policy management. There are also quite a few new features for promoting content between environments. Low-code is also being promoted: Java customizations are being limited, and APIs are being favored to feed content into Liferay. This facilitates migrations and offers more flexibility in the choice of front-end technologies.

Thomas: Cloud native is a significant advance. Liferay now offers standardized configurations for deployment on any cloud, whether AWS, GCP, or on-premise. This paves the way for industrialization of environments and better overall performance.

Cédric: The ability to partition the Liferay database has generated a lot of interest, particularly among our large enterprise customers. This will enable environments to be split, security to be improved, update actions to be parallelized, and migrations to be facilitated. It's a real step forward. 

Thomas: We work with highly specialized profiles dedicated to Liferay, but we are increasingly integrating front-end, UX, and mobile experts. For example, the mobile team develops Flutter applications that use Liferay APIs. We are also trying to industrialize our practices, with containerization (Docker, Devpods) to facilitate the integration of new employees and ensure consistency across environments.

Cédric: The goal is not to reinvent the wheel with every project. We implement Starter themes, we gather best practices from other CMS teams such as Drupal, and we streamline everything related to the development environment. This allows us to be more efficient and deploy new projects quickly.

Cédric: The human aspect, without a doubt. The networking events, informal discussions, discovering Madrid... You meet passionate people who share the same concerns and are proud of their product. It's also an opportunity to discover other cultures and other ways of seeing things. Next year, it will be in London, and I'm sure the atmosphere will be just as friendly.

Thomas: It's important to remember that there are people behind the solution. We talk to the product teams, suggest improvements, and forge links with partners around the world. It's a real community, active and committed.

Cédric: DEVCON allows us to anticipate product developments, adapt our migrations, and remain proactive in the face of change. It's also an opportunity to showcase our expertise, strengthen the community, and contribute to the continuous improvement of the platform.

Thomas: In short, it's an unmissable event for staying at the forefront of innovation, networking with key players in the sector, and preparing for the future of our digital projects.