Developing Vaadin Portlets for Liferay

    The self-contained way is easier and more flexible to start with, as the different portlets may have different versions of the resources. Currently, the latest Maven archetypes support the self-contained portlets, while with portlets created with the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse only support globally deployed resources.

    Using shared resources is more efficient when you have multiple Vaadin portlets on the same page, as they can share the common resources. However, they must use exactly same Vaadin version. This is recommended for production environments, where you can even serve the theme and widget set from a front-end server. You can install the shared resources as described in Installing Vaadin Resources.

    At the time of writing, the latest Liferay release 6.2 is bundled with a version of Vaadin release 6. If you want to use Vaadin 7 portlets with shared resources, you first need to remove the old ones as described in .

    When creating a Liferay portlet project with a Maven archetype or the Liferay IDE, you need to define a Liferay profile. With the Liferay IDE, you can create it when you create the project, as described in Creating a Portlet Project in Liferay IDE, but for creating a project from the Maven archetype, you need to define in manually.

    Liferay profile can be defined either in the user or in the global settings.xml file for Maven. The global settings file is located in ${MAVEN_HOME}/conf/settings.xml and the user settings file in ${USER_HOME}/.m2/settings.xml. To create a user settings file, copy at least the relevant headers and root element from the global settings file.

    The parameters are as follows:

    liferayinstall

    Full (absolute) path to the Liferay installation directory.

    liferay.version

    Liferay version by the Maven version numbering scheme. The first two (major and minor) numbers are same as in the installation package. The third (maintenance) number starts from 0 with first GA (general availability) release.

    liferay.maven.plugin.version

    This is usually the same as the Liferay version.

    liferay.auto.deploy.dir

    The Liferay auto-deployment directory. It is by default deploy under the Liferay installation path.

    liferay.tomcat.version(optional)

    If using Tomcat, its version number.

    liferay.tomcat.dir

    Full (absolute) path to Tomcat installation directory. For Tomcat bundled with Liferay, this is under the Liferay installation directory.

    liferay.app.server.deploy.dir

    Directory where portlets are deployed in the application server used for Liferay. This depends on the server - for Tomcat it is the webapps directory under the Tomcat installation directory.

    liferay.app.server.lib.global.dir

    Library path where libraries globally accessible in the application server should be installed.

    liferay.app.server.portal.dir

    Deployment directory for static resources served by the application server, under the root path of the server.

    If you modify the settings after the project is created, you need to touch the POM file in the project to have the settings reloaded.

    Activating Maven Liferay Profile

    Creation of Vaadin a Maven project is described in . For a Liferay project, you should use the vaadin-archetype-liferay-portlet.

    The archetype has a number of parameters. If you use Maven Plugin for Eclipse (m2e) to create the project, you get to enter the parameters after selecting the archetype, as shown in Liferay Project Archetype Parameters.

    Minimally, you just need to enter the artifact ID. To activate the Maven profile created as described earlier in , you need to specify the profile in the Profiles field under the Advanced section.

    liferay maven project

    Liferay Project Archetype Parameters

    The other parameters are the following:

    vaadinVersion

    Vaadin release version for the Maven dependency.

    uiClassName

    Class name of the UI class stub to be created.

    theme

    Theme to use. You can use either a project theme, which must be compiled before deployment, or use the liferay theme.

    portletTitle

    Title shown in the portlet title bar.

    portletShortTitle

    Title shown in contexts where a shorter title is preferred.

    portletKeywords

    Keywords for finding the portlet in Liferay.

    portletDescription

    A description of the portlet.

    portletName

    Identifier for the portlet, used for identifying it in the configuration files.

    portletDisplayName

    Liferay IDE, which you install in Eclipse as plugins just like the Vaadin plugin, enables a development environment for Liferay portlets. Liferay IDE allows integrated deployment of portlets to Liferay, just like you would deploy servlets to a server in Eclipse. The project creation wizard supports creation of Vaadin portlets.

    Loading widget sets, themes, and the Vaadin JAR from a portlet is possible as long as you have a single portlet, but causes a problem if you have multiple portlets. To solve this, Vaadin portlets need to use a globally installed widget set, theme, and Vaadin libraries.

    Liferay 6.2, which is the latest Liferay version at the time of publication of this book, comes bundled with an older Vaadin 6 version. If you want to use Vaadin 7, you need to remove the bundled version and install the newer one manually as described in this chapter.

    In these instructions, we assume that you use Liferay bundled with Apache Tomcat, although you can use almost any other application server with Liferay just as well. The Tomcat installation is included in the Liferay installation package, under the tomcat-x.x.x directory.

    Before installing a new Vaadin version, you need to remove the version bundled with Liferay. You need to remove the Vaadin library JAR from the library directory of the portal and the VAADIN directory from under the root context. For example, with Liferay bundled with Tomcat, they are usually located as follows:

    • tomcat-x.x.x/webapps/ROOT/html/VAADIN

    To use common resources needed by multiple Vaadin portlets, you can install them globally as shared resources as described in the following.

    If you are installing Vaadin in a Liferay version that comes bundled with an older version of Vaadin, you first need to remove the resources as described in Removing the Bundled Installation.

    In the following, we assume that you use only the built-in “liferay” theme in Vaadin and the default widget set.

    1. Get the Vaadin installation package from the Vaadin download page

    2. Extract the following Vaadin JARs from the installation package: vaadin-server.jar and vaadin-shared.jar, as well as the vaadin-shared-deps.jar and jsoup.jar dependencies from the lib folder

    3. Rename the JAR files as they were listed above, without the version number

    4. Put the libraries in tomcat-x.x.x/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/

    You need to define the widget set, the theme, and the JAR in the portal-ext.properties configuration file for Liferay, as described earlier. The file should normally be placed in the Liferay installation directory. See Liferay documentation for details on the configuration file.

    Below is an example of a portal-ext.properties file:

    The allowed parameters are:

    vaadin.resources.path

    Specifies the resource root path under the portal context. This is /html by default. Its actual location depends on the portal and the application server; in Liferay with Tomcat it would be located at webapps/ROOT/html under the Tomcat installation directory.

    vaadin.widgetset

    The widget set class to use. Give the full path to the class name in the dot notation. If the parameter is not given, the default widget set is used.

    vaadin.theme

    Name of the theme to use. If the parameter is not given, the default theme is used, which is reindeer in Vaadin 6.

    You will need to restart Liferay after creating or modifying the portal-ext.properties file.