Hot Deploy Development

This section of the guide is a quick start to plugins development and deployment guide, using Liferay's Plugins Software Development Kit. Plugins (portlets and themes) are now the preferred way to add functionality to Liferay, as they have several benefits over using the extension environment:

● Plugins can be composed of multiple smaller portlet and theme projects. This reduces the complexity of individual projects, allowing developers to more easily divide up project functionality

● Plugins are completely separate from the Liferay core. Portlet plugins written to the JSR-168 standard are deployable on any portlet container

● Plugins can be hot deployed (i.e., deployed while the server is running) and are available immediately. This prevents any server downtime for deployments

There are multiple ways to create portlet and theme plugins for Liferay. Many IDEs on the market today support portlet projects natively, and theme projects are nothing more than standard web modules with style sheets, images, and optional JavaScript and Velocity templates in them. Because of this, there are many tools which can be used to create plugins, from text editors to full blown integrated development environments. If you are already familiar with such a tool, you may use that tool to create plugins.

Because Liferay makes every effort to remain tool agnostic, we provide a Plugins Software Development Kit (SDK) which may be used to create both portlet and theme plugins. This SDK may be used with any text editor or IDE to create plugins for Liferay. Though it is not necessary to use this SDK to create plugins, it is the recommended method.

This section of the document will show you how to create both portlet and theme plugins using Liferay's plugin SDK. In the process, this will also show you the proper project layout for portlet and theme plugins, allowing you to use your own tools to create plugins if you wish to do so.