Liferay Portal 7 - Getting Started Guide - Development Tooling Options

This post is part of Liferay Portal 7 Getting Started Guide Series.

In previous post, I wrote steps to setup Liferay portal. What's next? Obviously, just Liferay's out-of-box features or functionality could not be sufficient to accomplish given business use cases. Do you have requirements of customizing liferay provided functionality (via various configuration options or implementing hook plugins) or incorporating custom developed liferay plugins or modules into Liferay portal (in form of portlets, themes, etc.)? Then, let's look at liferay development tooling options.

Liferay Development Tooling Options

Liferay supports different development tooling options. If you are newbie to Liferay, then don't get confused. Below is crux of Liferay Tooling documentation.

• Liferay IDE: If you are accustomed to use Eclipse IDE, go for this option. Here,
• Liferay Plugin project = Ant / Maven build type. (*** Refer few quick pointers further on this)
• Liferay Module Project = Gradle build type.
• Blade CLI: If you love to use command line tools and want freedom to create projects that can be used with any IDE or development environment, then go for this option. In short, this is a command line tool bootstrapped on to a Gradle based environment that is used to build Liferay 7.0 modules. 
• Liferay Workspace: A generated environment that is built to hold and manage your Liferay projects, which can be created using both tooling options Liferay IDE as well as Blade CLI. This is the official way to develop newly introduced Liferay 7.0 way of modules using Gradle. At the same time, it also supports older way of developing WAR-style plugins using the Liferay Ant based Plugins SDK.

Few Quick Pointers

At the time of writing this post, following are key pointers to choose development strategy for Liferay 7.

• Are you looking for old WAR style plugins development (i.e. portlets, themes, hooks, etc.) using Maven, which works greatly with Liferay 6.2? Well, latest Liferay IDE has option to create Maven based plugin project (Liferay New Plugin Project -> Build Type = Maven), but not working as expected. (for example). Because sadly mavens plugins sdk is not available yet for Liferay 7. In fact, I downloaded Liferay Maven Artifacts for Liferay 7 version (e.g. liferay-portal-maven-7.0-ce-ga1-20160331161017956.zip) and installed it in local maven repository, but that also didn't work. So check maven central repository for latest update, before spending time to try Liferay Maven Plugins with Liferay 7.

• Are you looking for old WAR style plugins development (i.e. portlets, themes, hooks, etc.) using Liferay Ant Plugins SDK? Well, Liferay IDE has option to create Maven based plugin project (Liferay New Plugin Project -> Build Type = Ant) or even new Liferay Workspace approach support to use Plugin SDK in Liferay 7. Although, Liferay 7 documentation is not available on this, you should be able to use it as per traditional approach of Liferay 6.2. Ensure to download Liferay Plugins SDK for Liferay 7 version (e.g. liferay-plugins-sdk-7.0-ce-ga1-20160331161017956.zip) and use it while creating Liferay Plugin Project. I quickly created MVC portlet and Service build app using Liferay Plugins and could deploy to Liferay 7 without issue.

• Liferay 7 Modular Architecture silently demands to understand new fundamentals like creating Workspace project and Modules using Liferay IDE or Blade CLI tooling.

What's next?

Why not to get started with basic setup of Liferay IDE followed by hello world liferay mvc portlet module developmentusing Liferay IDE and deployment to Liferay Portal!