NOAA’s Virtual Laboratory (VLab) Move to Liferay Digital Experience (DXP)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Virtual Laboratory (VLab) has experienced tremendous growth year over year since its inception in 2012. VLab provides collaboration tools (web content management, document library, forums, forms, and blogs), and development tools (project and issue management, revision control, code review, and continuous integration). In order to meet the needs of NOAA the VLab has continued to evolve. This past year the VLab Collaboration Services was migrated to the latest version of Liferay called the Liferay Digital Experience (DXP). Liferay DXP is a modular portal framework using OSGI standards and Elastic Search for its search engine. This new framework enables VLab to scale as the project grows and provide a dynamic, flexible collaboration space. In addition to infrastructure changes, energies are being spent on the look and feel of VLab to make for a more pleasant and enjoyable end-user experience.

 

VLab is now an essential component in the transition of research to operations (R2O) for the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) as well as the National Weather Service (NWS) Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) II system. Both groups make full use of the collaboration and development services within VLab.

 

An overview and live demo of the VLab will be presented, highlighting tools facilitating R2O as well as the upgrade work from the previous version of Liferay to Liferay DXP.