Starting with Liferay and a bit overwhelmed with how to begin

Question

Hello I would like to start developing a lifeRay theme and am a little bit lost!

I am a Mac user and i have installed liferay and also Xcode but i am not clear how to begin.

I have downloaded the SDK for liferay but i do not understand how to install it or use it for that matter, so questions:

Is Xcode an appropriate development environment to work with or is something else a little easier to get on with?

Does Xcode build in the same way ANT does?

How do i install the SDK? Do i just drop it into Tomcat and away i go?

Yes i am very new to all this!! I am not actually sure if i am asking the right questions

Answer 1

Until two minutes ago, I had never heard of this software. But does it seem silly to start with the Liferay Quick Start Guide?

Answer 2

Have you read the Liferay documentation on creating themes such as http://content.liferay.com/document/Liferay%20Themes.pdf

Do you have experience working with Java web apps in XCode? If not I'd try something like Eclipse or Netbeans that is more widely used.

Answer 3

Check out this reference: http://www.liferay.com/web/satyaranjan/blog/-/blogs/portal-pack-:-write-database-portlet-using-service-builder-plug-in

"The service builder framework in Liferay represents the database layer and all the interactions with database are done through service builder infrastructure. So in this blog, I will explain how you can use service builder framework inside your custom portlet using NetBeans 6.5 & Portal Pack 3.0. To use service builder framework, you first need to create a service xml and then generate the required code. The Portal Pack here helps you by providing a nice GUI editor for service.xml file where you can define the entities or database structures and from the same GUI you can generate the services code which can be used inside your portlet."

Answer 4

I just responded to a similar question (more detail on the theme part) .... basically, you need to use the terminal to use most of the SDK functionality.

if you're just developing a theme, you'll need to have the sdk and one of the server bundles downloaded. put them in the same folder so you end up with something like

liferay/

liferay/tomcat (holding the tomcat bundle)

liferay/plugins (holding the plugin sdk)

liferay/deploy

then configure the .properties file .... create a file in the plugins folder and name it

build.[YOURNAME].properties ....

run this in the terminal window ... note the backtics aren't apos.

touch build.`whoami`.properties

edit the file and add these lines ...

app.server.dir=${project.dir}/../tomcat auto.deploy.dir=${project.dir}/../deploy

then in the tomcat folder edit

tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties

and edit / add the following line

 resource.repositories.root=/path/to/liferay
 auto.deploy.dest.dir=/path/to/liferay/deploy

.... to start the server change to the main folder and enter

tomcat/bin/startup.sh

you can watch the server's log by typing

tail -f tomcat/logs/catalina.out

Check my other post for all the CSS and THEME stuff ....

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2080314/need-to-change-template-styles-in-liferay/2250275#2250275