Hi liferayers!

I spend my days writing Liferay portlets and there are a lot of tasks that are common to almost every portlet I have to do. It is very usual that the customers ask for a portlet that manage something, for example "Enterprise Resources" (like pcs, phones, cars...) or "Schools".

But what do they have in common? You may ask.

Well, the basic portlet has the following parts:

• Edit/detail view form
• Search container with all the items and the action menu
• Search form
• Advanced search form

After you create all these "screens" you can create, delete, update, search these objetcs... and it's ALWAYS the same. Wouldn't it be great to do this automatically?

I know there's something called OpenXava that aims to achive this, but it's a developer approach. I want a PORTLET in Liferay that creates PORTLETS.

In SugarCRM you have a module builder that do exactly this, you can define the fields of the new object, and you create the forms, so that with a few mouse clicks you have a custom new module ready to use. It creates the database tables too...

You can create a new module (we would call it portlet) in a few steps:

• You select the fields of your object and their types
• You say if it's related with any other system object
• You define the forms (View, edit, search container, search and advanced search) with a drag and drop system
• You publish it directly into the system

When I first used SugarCRM, the first thing I thougt was: "I wish Liferay had something like this!"

This will reduce the ammount of work hours needed to create a simple portlet and every user could create a custom portlet without developing... wouldn't it be great?!

This is an initial article. I will go on writing about this in the following days

The forum discussion post is this one: http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/4286082