Liferay in action : the official guide to Liferay Portal development

378 Pages·2012·19.147 MB·English

by  Rich Sezov

Official Guide
IN ACTION
Richard Sezov, Jr.
FOREWORD BY BRIAN KIM
M A N N I N G
Liferay in Action

Liferay in Action
The Official Guide to
Liferay Portal Development
RICH SEZOV, JR
MANNING
SHELTER ISLAND
To my wife: Yo Deborah! I did it!
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ISBN: 9781935182825
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 – MAL – 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
brief contents
PART 1 WORKING WITH LIFERAY AND PORTLETS....................... 1
1 ■ The Liferay difference 3
2 ■ Getting started with the Liferay
development platform 30
PART 2 WRITING APPLICATIONS ON LIFERAY’S PLATFORM ....... 63
3 ■ A data-driven portlet made easy 65
4 ■ MVC the Liferay way 91
5 ■ Designing your site with themes and
layout templates 128
6 ■ Making your site social 154
7 ■ Enabling user collaboration 176
PART 3 CUSTOMIZING LIFERAY............................................. 209
8 ■ Hooks 211
9 ■ Extending Liferay effectively 241
10 ■ A tour of Liferay APIs 263
v

contents
foreword xiii
preface xv
acknowledgments xvii
about this book xx
about the cover illustration xxiv
PART 1 WORKING WITH LIFERAY AND PORTLETS ........... 1
1 The Liferay difference 3
1.1 The Java portal promise: from disappointment to
fulfillment 4
The Java portal disappointment 6 ■ Liferay keeps the Java
portal promises 8
1.2 Getting to know Liferay 9
Liferay is an application aggregator 10 ■ Liferay is a content
manager 12 ■ Liferay is a collaboration tool 14 ■ Liferay is
anything you want it to be and any way you want it to look 15
What has this little exercise accomplished? 17
1.3 How Liferay structures a portal 18
The high-level view 18 ■ Adding content to a collection with
pages 20 ■ Configuring a portlet’s scope 20
vii
viii CONTENTS
1.4 Getting around in Liferay 23
Pin icon 24 ■ Add menu 24 ■ Manage menu 24
Toggle Edit Controls 26 ■ Go To menu 26 ■ User Account 26
1.5 Imagining your site in Liferay 26
Asking the right questions 27 ■ Defining and categorizing
collections 28 ■ Designing content 28
1.6 Summary 28
2 Getting started with the Liferay development platform 30
2.1 Installing Liferay and the Plugins SDK 31
Installing the Java SDK 32 ■ Installing a Liferay bundle 33
2.2 A crash course in Liferay server administration 35
Removing the sample web site 35 ■ Setting up a database 35
Connecting Liferay to the SQL database 37
2.3 Setting up the Plugins SDK 38
Installing Ant 38 ■ Installing the Plugins SDK 39
Configuring the Plugins SDK 39 ■ Configuring a non-Tomcat
application server 41
2.4 Developing a portlet plugin 42
Creating a portlet plugin: Hello World 43 ■ Deploying the
Hello World plugin 43
2.5 Making Hello World into Hello You 45
Anatomy of a portlet project 46 ■ Configuring Hello You 47
Portlet initialization and implementing View mode 49 ■ URLs
in portals are different 52 ■ Implementing Edit mode 53
2.6 Deploying and testing your portlet 57
Changing the portlet’s category and name 58 ■ Telling Liferay
about a renamed portlet 60
2.7 Summary 61
PART 2 WRITING APPLICATIONS ON
LIFERAY’S PLATFORM ...................................... 63
3 A data-driven portlet made easy 65
3.1 Introducing Inkwell: a case study 65
Company profile: Inkwell 66 ■ What Inkwell needs in a web
site 67 ■ Inkwell’s high-level portal design 67 ■ Inkwell
portal phase 1 requirements 68
CONTENTS ix
3.2 Designing the Product Registration portlet 69
A blueprint of the portlet 69 ■ Designing the database
tables 70 ■ Defining portlet modes and generating the project 72
3.3 Generating DB code with Service Builder 72
Filling a definite need 73 ■ Creating the service.xml file 75
Running Service Builder 77
3.4 Creating a buffer to the persistence layer 78
Why layering is important 78 ■ Using two layers for
persistence 79 ■ Implementing the DTO layer 80
3.5 Service Builder in action 84
Defining table relationships 84 ■ Sharing services 87
Adding registered users and their products 88
3.6 Summary 90
4 MVC the Liferay way 91
4.1 Using Model-View-Controller 92
Edit mode? What Edit mode? 93 ■ MVC according to Liferay 95
4.2 Configuring the portlet project 96
Defining portlets in your deployment descriptors 97 ■ Having
one location for JSP dependencies 99
4.3 Creating a form with AlloyUI taglibs 102
Getting started with AlloyUI tag libraries 102 ■ Providing
feedback and messages 105 ■ Translating messages to multiple
languages 108 ■ Validating user-submitted forms 109
Displaying data with the search container 111 ■ Using the
search container to present your data 111 ■ Editing and
deleting data 114 ■ Protecting data with Liferay
permissions 116 ■ Pointing to the permissions
configuration 116 ■ Configuring Liferay permissions 117
4.4 Generating different field types with AlloyUI taglibs 120
Generating date pickers 121 ■ Selecting data with AlloyUI
taglibs 122
4.5 Using Liferay’s MVC makes your portlets simpler 124
4.6 Summary 126
5 Designing your site with themes and layout templates 128
5.1 Understanding themes and their structure 129
Generating a theme project 131 ■ Deconstructing a theme 131