Introduction to Liferay

Copyright © 2000-2007 Liferay, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.No material may be reproduced electronically or in print without written

permission from Liferay, LLC.

Liferay Portal Highlights!

User Interface• Drag and Drop portlets• Able to customize the font, background, borders and icon per

portlet!• Completely customize the look and feel of the portlet with

Themes

Fine-grained Permissions• Assign View, Edit and Delete permissions to Organizations,

Locations and Users on a per portlet basis• Control permissions all the way down to the object level.

(For example, Joe Bloggs has the permissions to edit topic A in category B of the message boards.)

Liferay Portal Highlights!

Auto-generate the Service and Persistence Layer• Auto-generate Hibernate objects, Spring mapping, and

wrappers for the business logic• Rated as one of the most useful features from Liferay

developers!

Powerful Content Management System• Design templates that allow every day users to easily edit the

content on the website• Leverages popular technologies such as XML (Structure),

XSLT (Layout) and Velocity• Redesigned templates that make it easy to create and add

articles out of the box!

Liferay Portal Highlights!

Database and Server Agnostic• Most vendors can only support one server and one database

Continuous Improvement• Liferay 4.2.2 features parallel rendering, integrated workflow

and more!

Over 50 portlets out of the box• Liferay has the most out of the box portlets of any vendor!• Mail portlet, Message Boards (Forums), Chat, Document

Library, Calendar, RSS, Breadcrumb and Navigation Portlets

Liferay Portal Highlights!

Focus on Standards Compliance• Support for JSR 168 (Portlet Specification), JSR 170 (Content

Repository), JSR 208 (Java Business Integration), Struts, Spring, JSF, WSRP

Partners with other Open Source leaders• Out of the box support for Alfresco CMS and Geronimo AS

Support for LDAP and SSO• Connect to the Apache Directory Server, Microsoft Active

Directory Server, Novell eDirectory or OpenLDAP(Also configurable via the Admin portlet)

• Ability to connect to other SSO servers like Yale’s SSO server

Meet and Greet!

Let’s take a moment and give a brief introduction of ourselves:

Name Company How you came to use Liferay

Meet and Greet!

Introduce yourself to your neighbors! Choose a partner!

• When you have a question, turn to your partner first, and see if you can figure out the answer together.

• Working as a team will help you to learn the material more quickly.

Training Day 1

• Introduction to Liferay• Installation

– Server: Java, Tomcat– Tools: Ant, Jikes, Liferay source code– Environment: ext– Database: MySQL– IDE: Eclipse

• Overview of the JSR-168 Specification• Creating Portlets

– JSP Portlet– Struts Portlet– JSP Portlet

Training Day 2

• Extending the Struts Portlet– Auto-generating the Service and Persistence layer– Implementing Business Logic to Create and

Retrieve Records from the Database– Redirect and Validation

• Debugging using Eclipse

• Overview of Spring

• Migrating Struts Application to a portlet environment

Training Day 3

• Overview of WSRP• Using Web Services in Liferay• Portal Administration• CMS- How to build a website on top of the

portal– Using the Journal content portlet to add an article– Adding portlets to your website using the portal

• Themes & Layouts – Configuring Properties– Editing the template– Editing the CSS– Add JavaScript Functions

Training Structure

Training will be presented in the following format:

1. Lecture: PowerPoint presentation

2. Lab: Implementing the exercise that was explained during the Lecture

Please do not work on the exercises during the presentation.

There will be plenty of time to work on the exercise after the presentation.

Training Structure

The best way you can learn is to listen to the overview, and make sure that you understand the concepts.

Don’t memorize details like syntax.You can easily look up this information as you go through each exercise.

Instead, make sure you understand key concepts like “How do I know that the EXT environment will be built in this directory?”“Why do I specify the location of the server in the ext directory and not the portal directory?”

Note to advanced developers:Feel free to skip ahead, but make sure you pay attention to the presentations. Even advanced developers will have something to learn during each section.

Directory Structure

installation The installation PowerPoints are located here.

training-downloads Programs that we will install are located here.

source-* The source code is included in the source-* folder for most presentations.For example, the source code for installation-3-ext-environment.ppt is located in source-installation-3.

Note on Installation

Installation can take some time because we are not just installing Liferay, but Tomcat, Ant, Jikes and MySQL as well.

We also need to go over how to use Tomcat, Ant, Jikes and MySQL for developers who do not have experience with open source technologies.

Next Steps!

Let’s get started with the Installation!

1. Go to the installation folder that you downloaded from the Training CD.

2. Open up installation-1-basic-setup.ppt

Revision History09/14/06 Edward Shin Author

11/13/06 Edward Shin Updated slides 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14 and 15

06/01/07 Jonas Yuan change course details