Development Documentation

Development Documentation

Samuel Kong, Editor

Copyright © 2008 by Liferay, Inc.

This work is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported license.

You are free:

• to share—to copy, distribute, and transmit the work

• to remix—to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

The full version of this license appears in the appendix of this book, or you may view it online here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Contributors:

Joseph Shum, Alexander Chow, Redmond Mar, Ed Shin, Rich Sezov, Samuel Kong

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Hot Deploy Development5

Initial Setup5

Introduction to Java Standard Portlets7

Creating A Portlet8

Anatomy of a Portlet9

A Closer Look at the Default JSP Portlet10

Creating Liferay Themes12

Theme Concepts13

Anatomy of a Theme13

JavaScript14

Settings15

Color Schemes16

Portal predefined settings17

Deployment18

Advanced Development18

Service Builder18

Define the Database Structure19

Generate Service Layer20

Create the Service Layer Class20

Security and Permissions Service20

2. Customizing Liferay: Developing in the Extension Environment31

Tools Setup31

Java Development Kit31

ANT32

MySQL 32

Liferay Source32

Setup Your Application Server and Liferay Portal32

Create the Extension Environment32

Configuring the Environment33

Setup the Database33

Deploy the Extension Environment34

Customizing Liferay34

File Structure Overview34

Advanced Development36

Liferay Services36

User Service36

Preface

This book was written as a quick guide to getting started developing on the Liferay Enterprise Portal platform. It is a guide for those who want to get their hands dirty developing for Liferay.

The information contained herein has been organized in a way that hopefully makes it easy to locate information.

Conventions

Sections are broken up into multiple levels of headings, and these make it easy to find information.

Source code and configuration file directives are presented like this.

Italics are used to represent links or buttons to be clicked on in a user interface and to indicate a label or a name of a Java class.

Bold is used to describe field labels.

Page headers denote the chapters, and footers denote the particular section within the chapter.

Notes

It is our hope that this book will be valuable to you, and that it will be an indispensable resource as you begin to develop on Liferay's platform. If you need any assistance beyond what is covered in this book, Liferay, Inc. offers training, consulting, and support services to fill any need that you might have. Please see http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/services for further information about the services we can provide.

As always, we welcome any feedback. If there is any way you think we could make this book better, please feel free to mention it on our forums. You can also use any of the email addresses on our Contact Us page (http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/about_us/contact_us). We are here to serve you, our users and customers, and to help make your experience using Liferay Portal the best it can be.