Apoorva Prakash and Shaik Inthiyaz Basha

Hands- On Liferay DXP

Learn Portlet Development and Customization Using OSGi Modules

Apoorva Prakash
BANGALORE, India
Shaik Inthiyaz Basha
Nellore, AP, India
ISBN 978-1-4842-8562-6e-ISBN 978-1-4842-8563-3
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8563-3
© Apoorva Prakash and Shaik Inthiyaz Basha 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

To my father, Dr. Om Prakash Srivastava, to whom I owe everything, and who inspired me but is not here to read this. Yes, life is like that sometimes! — Apoorva Prakash

Introduction

Liferay has been a market leader in ready-to-deploy portals for quite some time. During its lifetime, Liferay has experienced several architectural upgrades that enhanced user and development experiences. Liferay DXP is the most mature version of Liferay. As Liferay matured, it kept adding several technologies; the biggest of which are OSGi and Gradle. OSGi added a layer of modularity to Liferay, whereas Gradle has given the deployment process more flexibility.

This book is a perfect fit for you if you possess basic Java knowledge and are familiar with the Liferay user interface. It’s perfect if you want to develop portlet modules in Liferay DXP and customize the default Liferay behavior. You will also learn about OSGi, Blade CLI, the Liferay development environment setup, and best practices. This book will help improve your productivity. If you are hands-on with an older version of Liferay or have little understanding of Liferay’s development approach and are looking forward to learning about the nitty-gritty of Liferay—DXP development—this book is a perfect fit for you.

Portlets are the heart and soul of Liferay development, and they can be created using multiple templates such as LiferayMVC, Spring, and others. Portlets are the endpoint for users, from where they can trigger different functionalities, such as database connectivity, IPC, schedulers, and so on.

Liferay is not all about custom development; you can also use its out-of-the-box functionalities to achieve requirements. To utilize its out-of-the-box functionality, you can customize Liferay default behavior in several ways, including customization of user interfaces, languages, action classes, events, services, and other aspects. Liferay’s out-of-the-box search framework can also be used to enable search in custom entities.

We tried to cover all concepts related to hands-on Liferay development and sincerely hope the book fulfills our readers’ expectations.

Source Code

All source code used in this book can be downloaded from github.com/Apress/Hands--On-Liferay-DXP-by-Apoorva-Prakash-and-Inthiyaz-Basha.

Acknowledgments
In life, one rarely comes across people whose few words or mere presence can bolster you to do something extraordinary. Many people encouraged us and contributed in innumerable ways when writing this book. We want to acknowledge the following key people whose humble support was a constant source of strength during the toil of creating this book:

  • Mr. Sanju Varghese Raju

  • Senior General Manager, Schneider Electric Pvt Ltd.

    One of the most humble and most genuine person we’ve met and we thank him for his continuous support, from inception to publishing this book.

  • Mr. Veera Vasantha Reddy

  • Assistant Vice President, Development Bank of Singapore.

    A technocrat and dear friend, and we thank him for his guidance and critical review comments.

  • Our families

  • For allowing us to burn the midnight oil and spend weekends on this book.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1:​ OSGi Basics 1
Understanding OSGi 1
How Is OSGi Different?​ 2
A Deeper Look at OSGi 3
OSGi Architecture 3
OSGi Bundles 5
OSGi Bundle Rules 7
Importing and Exporting Bundles 8
OSGi Bundle Lifecycle 9
Bundle States 10
OSGi Components 12
OSGi Services 14
Service Registry 16
Declarative Services 16
Liferay’s OSGi Architecture 19
OSGi Features 20
Summary 22
Chapter 2:​ Liferay Development Basics 23
The Liferay Workspace 23
Liferay Workspace Primer 24
Build Tools 26
Gradle 26
Maven 27
Introduction to Liferay Modules 29
The Blade CLI 32
Running Liferay the First Time 33
Running Liferay Application 34
Database Connectivity with Liferay DXP 37
Gogo Shell 42
Summary 44
Chapter 3:​ Portlet Module Development 45
Introduction to Portlets 45
Portlet Specifications 47
Portlet Lifecycle 47
Portlet Modes and Window States 50
Portlet Mode 51
Window States 51
Java Standard Portlets 52
A Closer Look at HelloApressPortl​et 56
Liferay Portlet Module (MVC Portlet) 58
Creating a Sample Liferay MVC Portlet 59
Understanding the Liferay MVC Portlet Controller 64
Understanding the Different URLs in the Liferay MVC Portlet 67
Understanding Different Commands in the Liferay MVC Portlet 82
Implementing Window State 96
Introduction to Other Portlet Modules 98
The Spring MVC Portlet 98
Liferay Soy Portlet 99
JSF Portlet 99
Bean Portlet 99
Gogo Shell in Action 100
Gogo Shell from the Liferay Control Panel 103
Gogo Shell from the Blade CLI 104
Summary 105
Chapter 4:​ Advanced Liferay Concepts 107
Inter-Portlet Communication 107
IPC via Public Render Parameters 108
IPC via Private Session Attributes 117
IPC via Server-Side Events 123
Client-Side IPC via Ajax 131
Client-Side IPC via Cookies 132
Liferay Message Bus 133
Synchronous Message Bus 140
Asynchronous Message Bus 142
Liferay Scheduler 145
Summary 149
Chapter 5:​ Service Builder Concepts 151
Introduction to the Service Builder 151
Generating Services 153
Deep Diving Into the Code Generated by the Service Builder 164
Customization via Implementation Classes 165
Remote Service Implementation 171
CRUD Operations 173
Finders 176
Dynamic Query 179
Custom SQL 181
Working with Remote Services 185
Headless REST APIs 185
Plain Web/​REST Services 191
Summary 194
Chapter 6:​ Liferay Customization 195
Overriding Language Keys 195
Global Language Property 196
Module Language Property 198
Customizing JSPs 200
Customization JSPs with Liferay APIs 201
Using OSGi Fragments or a Custom JSP Bag 207
Customizing Services Using Wrappers 212
Customizing OSGi Services 218
Customizing MVC Commands 220
Customizing Models Using Model Listeners 226
Expando Attributes 229
Pre and Post-Actions 236
Customizing Search 240
Summary 245
Index 247
About the Authors
Apoorva Prakash

A photo of Apoorva Prakash.

is a Liferay-certified professional who has worked on Liferay for over a decade. Currently, he works with Schneider Electric Pvt Ltd., India, as a Liferay Expert and Engineering Lead for a team working on various projects of different technologies, including NodeJS, Python, AWS-based serverless technologies, and so on. Apoorva has defined the architecture of multiple portals, including large employee portals, ecommerce sites, and so on, in Liferay for over 12 years and counting. His other work areas include NodeJS, Python, AWS, and Kubernetes. Development and deployment are his passions, and he is inherently very keen on attention to detail. He is an avid blogger, and his blog has been mentioned in the Liferay community round-up several times. Apoorva has completed his master’s degree in computer application from the school of computer science, Apeejay Institute of Technology, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. His other hobbies are tech blogging and wildlife photography.
 
Shaik Inthiyaz Basha

A photo of ShaikInthiyaz Basha.

is a Liferay Architect and Technical Expert at Schneider Electric Pvt Ltd., India. He is an expert in Content Management Systems (CMS) and Amazon Web Service (AWS). Inthiyaz currently holds the position of Platform Architect in a group involved in developing Liferay and Elastic Search applications. His accomplishments in enhancing and creating various Liferay components are evident from his various successful implementations. His experience and knowledge are supported by certificates such as Liferay Backend Developer (DXP). Inthiyaz is also the founder of the https://letuslearnliferay.blogspot.com , which contains a lot of information on Liferay and the CMS world. Since 2011, he has created various kinds of CMS applications, supporting large banking and financial systems. His main area of interest is web applications. Inthiyaz uses Java, AWS, and Elastic Search on a daily basis, but he is open to learning other technologies and solutions. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Networks from Quba College of Eng & Tech, Affiliated with JNTUA University, Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, India.
 
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