liferay portlets
Portlet Development With Liferay
Development Portlet With Liferay
Development Liferay Portlet
Portlet Development With Liferay
Development Portlet With Liferay
Development Liferay Portlet
Liferay Portlet Development
Development Portlet in liferay
Portlet Development in liferay
Portlet liferay Development
Portlets are small applications that are rendered in the larger context of a portal. When you view any of the popular portals like " Yahoo " you see the home page organised into small boxes displaying mail, news, photos, advertisements and other details. These boxes are called portlets. To develop portlets, there are various competing technologies: Google Gadgets; Microsoft Sharepoint Portal; and in the world of Java, we have two specifications—JSR-286 and JSR-168—that govern Portlet development. JSR-286 supersedes JSR-168, and is mostly compatible with its predecessor. JSR-286 is sometimes called the Portlet 2.0 specification. The portlet specification is similar to the Java Servlet specification. Understanding the servlet API would shorten the process of learning Portlet technology.
Portlet containers
Portlet containers house the deployed portlets and render them in the context of the portal. There are various portlet containers in the market. WebLogic Portal and WebSphere Portal are popular proprietary portal servers. In the open source space, we have Liferay, JBoss Portal, OpenPortal, Pluto and others.
Liferay
After a small evaluation of different Portal servers, I shortlisted Liferay. Here is a list of the winning points:
Support for the latest standards and specifications
Various innovations in the UI layer
An extensive set of pre-build ready-to-deploy portlets
A good community
Open development
Prerequisites
Software prerequisites:
JDK 1.6
Maven 2.1
Liferay 5.2
Knowledge prerequisites—a working knowledge of the following technologies will be helpful:
Servlets
JSP
JSTL and EL
Liferay installation
The only prerequisite to install Liferay is that you should have the Java Development Kit in your system. Liferay downloads are conveniently packaged with various application servers and servlet containers. Download the one that you are comfortable with, and extract it. The installation is then complete. The extracted directory will be called LIFERAY_DIR hereafter.
Writing the first JSR-286 portlet
Let us start with the ubiquitous example, writing the Hello World portlet.
create a new project (use mvn archetype:generate). Choose a normal WAR project (option 18 in the menu). For our example, I have given com.liferabook, hello-world and com.liferaybook as the groupId, artifactId and the package, respectively.
........
............
...............
