Liferay
7
is exciting release from Liferay Inc. and it’s definitely a promising product, will
have many new functional features and many architectural improvements.
Liferay is really putting lot of efforts towards to
Liferay 7 development. Liferay 7 Expedition
is program there we can see all new features and updates about Liferay 7.
Liferay completed alpha
and beta releases and they already released the Liferay 7 RC version. Couple of months they are going to release Liferay 7 GA release and no doubt it’s
really a promising product for developers and customers as well.
OSGi
Support
Bootstrap
3.0 Look and Feel
Java
8 Support
Alloy
Editor
Elastic
Search
Support
Integration Testing through Arquillian
Application
Display Templates Support for Login, Language and Breadcrumb portlets.
Improvements in Web content management
Singe
Page Application Development
Document
Management storages extracted as modules
Service
Builder code now uses Declarative Services instead of Spring for dependency
injection
OSGi
Support
Liferay 7 has supported OSGi modular based
environment. Open Services Gateway
initiative is standards for modular
based application development.
OSGi will provide ability to create application in
several components and all components together work as application and each
component is independent and much decoupled from other components of course sometimes
there is dependency among components.
OSGi provide container and it will responsible of
components lifecycle so that we won’t need to concentrated on underlying things
about component such as components lifecycle and its dependency related things.
OSGi will get rid of you from class loader issues and as for OSGi several components together
became as bundle and each bundle have its own class loader. All bundles class
loaders will be managed by OSGi
container so that we cannot get any class loader issued and especially you
can get rid of from ClassNotFoundException
and NoClassDefFoundError
OSGi is dynamic modular development architecture so
that we can deploy and un-deploy bundles without down the application. Another
advantage is same time we can run different versions for same application such
way OSGi container developed.
Traditional web application have Application server
and we deploy application into application servers when we move application to
another environment such as from UAT to production we need to take care many configurations
and other related things.
OSGi have different way of implementation to provide web
application runtime support so that each thing we can consider as service. To
run web application in OSGi we need to integrate or deploy HTTP service so that we can run web applications.
Liferay
7
has implemented these OSGi support so that we can develop Liferay application
as bundles or components. Running these bundles or deploy and un-deploy
definitely going to be very easy when compared with before architecture.
We don’t worry about portlet, hook, Ext, theme and
layout and everything going to be bundle. These bundles we can activate, run, and
deactivate and we don’t need to down the application.
Liferay
7
has introduced new way of Liferay application development that is bundles. We
cannot differentiate development for portlet, hook, Ext, theme and layout. We
can forget about Liferay Plugins SDK
environment and we can start developing Liferay Applications as OSGi bundles.
Liferay is developing application development
environment and its tool called BLADE Tools
which will provide way to develop Liferay
Applications as OSGi bundles.
BLADE tools offer you MAVEN and GRADLE based build to create and deploy Liferay
Applications as OSGi bundles.
BLADE
Tools for Liferay
Liferay also started developing Liferay IDE and its used BLADE
Tools to create and deploy bundles. Now it’s in progress and for now we can
directly use BLADE Tools Command Line Interface to create
Liferay Applications as OSGi bundles.
Liferay
7
supports to use Service builder tool in OSGi bundles, it’s also provide way to
call Liferay API inside OSGi bundles and its provide support to use JSP in OSGi
bundlels.
Liferay 7 have used features from Apache Felix and Eclipse
Equinox OSGi implementation. It provide OSGi console (Apache GOGO) and Command Line Interface to deploy, activate and de-activate
bundles in OSGi container.
Bootstrap
3.0 Look and Feel
Liferay 6.2 have used Bootstrap 2.x and Now Liferay 7 have used Bootstrap 3.0 so that look and feel for portal and its applications
are really going to be good. All Liferay
AUI components have used Bootstrap 2.x before and using Bootstrap 3.0 in
Liferay 6.2 is really challenging and once we use bootstrap 3.0 UI developer
need to put lot effort to adjust the things in theme level or AUI components
level.
Now with bootstrap 3.0 all Liferay AUI components
already used it and it won’t be problem to create themes with bootstrap 3.0.
Java
8 Support
Liferay 8 completely computable with Java 8. Oracle
have stopped updates for Java 7 and Java 6. So now Liferay 7 completely
considered only Java 8 and they implemented Liferay 7 to run on Java 8.
Java 8 have many features so it will be valued added
to Liferay Application development like Lambdas
and Functional Interfaces, Default and Static Methods in interfaces ,Stream
API .Date Time API Improvements for Time Zones and Nashorn, JavaScript Engine
are really pretty cool features in Java 8. We cannot see java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space in Liferay 7 any more.
Alloy
Editor
Alloy Editor is one of project from Liferay and it has
provided better way of edit and create web content in Liferay. Liferay previous
versions have used CKEditor and Now Liferay 7 have used Alloy Editor.
Alloy Editor Build on top CKEditor and its provided
better and good look feel option to edit or create content. This editor we use
extensively for WCM, Blogs, Wikis and Message boards in Liferay and also we can
use it for custom portlets.
Nice feature is that it provides inline content edit
so that edit control will available for each elements in content like text,
images, headers and links. So that we can directly click on elements can see
the edit control.
Elastic Search
Liferay before it’s used the Lucene search engine to
search content in Liferay and Liferay 7 integrated Elastic Search as default search.
Support
Integration Testing through Arquillian
One of the challenging thing Liferay is testing of
application and there is no specific way to test and run test cases in Liferay.
Generally we use Junit for unit testing.
Liferay have come up with better testing support to
test and execute Liferay applications and Liferay 7 have given flexibility to use
integration testing for portlets and OSGi plugins using Arquillian integration
framework. This really cool for test Liferay applications such as OSGi bundles
and portlet.
Application
Display Templates Support for Login, Language and Breadcrumb portlets.
ADT is great way of customize the look and feel of
existed portlets in Liferay through Free Marker Templates. In Liferay 6.2 have
given ADT support for few portlets such as Asset
Publisher, Blogs, Wikis, Navigation and Category Navigation and it added few more portlet in the list
such as Login, Language and Breadcrumb
portlets.
Improvements in Web content management
Liferay 7 brings some of cool improvements in Web
content management system such as Alloy UI editor to create and edit web
content and ability to create mail templates for multiple languages and its
changed CKFile browser to Liferay own file browser in side Alloy Editor.
Singe
Page Application (SPA) Development
Now trends is
Single Page Application using MVC based java script libraries with awesome look
and feel with bootstrap. Liferay 7 have bring support for SPA application using
SennaJs. Now all portlet become as
Single Page Application so that user can navigate to anywhere without reloading
entire portal page.
Document
Management storages extracted as modules
Previous Liferay version have different ways of
documents storage systems such as Jackrabbit (JCR) , DB Store and Advanced
Filesystem when we want switch among these stores we need to do configuration
in portal properties files and to effect the changes we need to stop server and
start it.
Now Liferay 7 have introduced these features as OSGi
modules so that we can dynamically active or deactivate bundles so that we can easily
switch among these storage systems.
Liferay 7 have introduced following types of document
storage as bundles such as Advanced
Filesystem, CMIS, DB, Filesystem, JCR and S3.
Service
Builder code now uses Declarative Services instead of Spring for dependency
injection
Declarative Services is one of run time service
provided by OSGi container to specify dependency services to other components
and it make available these services to consumer bundle/component.
These dependency services declared as XML
configuration so that when we deploy bundle into OSGi container then its resolves
the all the dependency services otherwise bundle won’t be activate and its responsibility
taken care by Service Component Runtime,
we can use either Equinox
Declarative Service or Apache Felix
SCR to provide feature in OSGi container. Liferay 7 have used default OSGi Declarative
Service model than Spring dependency. Generally Declarative Service model
service will be available or activates when it started using otherwise it won’t
be start but Spring Decency, the spring container will prepare the object based
on XML configuration it will inject all objects and make it available complex Object
in the spring container even we use it or not.
Due to Declarative
Service we can resolve all dependency services resolution before bundle
activated so that there is no run time exceptions or errors with respect dependency
services.
Challenges
Liferay 7 is really good exciting but migration from
older Liferay version to Liferay 7 is really challenging task because changes
made at articular level.
One good thing is that Liferay 7 still used the
traditional application server to run Liferay core portal than completely
switching to OSGi HTTP based service. This really sign that we can migrate
older versions to Liferay 7.
Due to Liferay 7 still used the Traditional
application server so that we have more possibility to deploy all Liferay
applications which are developed for previous versions will work and run in
Liferay 7
Of course Liferay 7 already focused on conversion
process from old Liferay plugins to OSGi based bundles.
Developer really need to habituate to OSGi based
bundles development for Liferay 7 so its take some time for developer to
understand development process. Because several years developers habituated to
Liferay Plugins SDK and different types Liferay application like hooks,
portlet, theme, layout and Ext and next we need to look at in the context that
everything is OSGi bundle.
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