Help with Liferay portlets,igoogle like portals

Question

Hi i am completely new to portlets and portals. I have had a brief(very brief) look at the jsr for portlets, installed liferay played around with its default portlets and set myself up an eclipse working environment in the hope of developing my own little portlet module.
I have to create a portal similar to igoogle, and the tabs system in chrome

I am not sure where to start with and I am reasonably comfortable with Java and have done some other J2EE apps, but dont really know how everything fits together in portal/portlet architecture (what files where etc) so any assistance you guys could lend would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you're committed to Liferay, the place to start is the Liferay SDK. They recently released a set of Eclipse plugins (Liferay IDE) which seem to automate much of the packaging for their toolkits (still ANT based - no good Maven resources that I'm aware of - current work has been proposed, but still seems broken/incomplete)

For some samples of portlets you can look at: https://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/plugins/trunk

I would warn you, Liferay portlets != JSR-168/286 - they have some extensions, and conventions beyond what's in the spec, and some of the platform's handlings default to different values than you might expect (e.g. preferences are shared across multiple users by default). Having said that, the same is true of most/all portlet containers.

Answer 2

You will first need to decide which technologies to use for the portlet.

The portlet specification assume usage of vanilla JSP / Servlet. You can however use other frameworks such as JSF, Struts, Spring, etc. using the corresponding "glue". There are examples for the various technologies in the sample portlets.

For JSF, this glue is the JSR-301 Portlet Bridge for JSF, then you can use other JSF component suites.

I'm currently working on a portlet for Liferay based on JSF and RichFaces, and that seems to works more or less. No major glitches so far.

I don't know if the other component suites are well supported in Liferay portlet environment. Also, I don't think JSF 2.0 and Portlet spec 2.0 are mature enough. So we decided to stick to JSF 1.x and Portlet 1.0.