Liferay Events: An Open Source Mobile App

If you've attended any Liferay Symposium, Solutions Forum, or Developer Conference in the last few years you've undoubtedly seen the companion mobile app that attendees can use to see up-to-date agendas, speaker info, session data, and a bunch of other features that enhance the attendee experience.

I'm happy to announce that the source code to this app (and its two server-side components here and here) is now available at GitHub and is waiting for you to check out (and developers to contribute!). The app is an example that showcases the real-world use of Liferay as a mobile data provider to a rich native app experience. It has been used at many of our events with thousands of attendees, speakers, sponsors, sessions, and more. Check out its documentation for details on how it works and how you as a mobile developer can also use it.

It takes advantage of several mobile features of the Liferay Platform, and there are many more for you to check out regardless of your mobile strategy (mobile developers and strategists won't want to miss next week's Developing Awesome Android Applications with Liferay Screens webcast!).

This app is not officially supported by Liferay, there is no official "release" and there is no one you can call to complain :) But you can contribute fixes, translations, or improvements! See the README for details.

Kudos

This project began as a re-purposed version of an app developed and demoed at WCS 2011 by LEVEL Studios (now Rosetta). The app was an early pioneering example of using Liferay to serve rich content to a mobile platform. Rosetta graciously agreed to donate the base app to Liferay and since then we have been adding new features in support of Liferay's worldwide events.
 
We wish to thank LEVEL Studios and Rosetta for their donation and commitment to the Liferay open source community!
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Hi James:
Have been looking at the entire events stack, mobile, Titanium, DDL's, etc. Thanks so much for showing how you have implemented using Liferay, an excellent collection of code and implementation!

Just curious, all the code to duplicate/investigate seems to be provided in Github, except for the Data Definitions. I know you've documented (excellently) the DDL's that are required, but, is there a chance you could provide the DDL XML definitions? Recreating these are extremely tedious and error prone, if you're trying to duplicate this approach.

Thanks again for effort in facilitating and documenting this, excellent work!

David
Hi James:
Any chance you guys are rewriting this using Screens? I've started this effort and was wondering if this is already being done by the LR team.

Also, any chance that you could post the DDL's per my previous post?

Thanks!
I would love to re-write with Screens - the only problem is, I'm not skilled enough at pure native dev to do it in my spare time emoticon I would love to see the work you've done though! Many of the screens are just lists of data so a single screenlet with lots of customization possibilities may handle a lot of it.

I will include the DDL XMLs in my next update, now that our event "season" is done. But I'm afraid it will require updating since the current liferay.com is on 6.1 emoticon
Hi James:
Great, having all these pieces will help.

And, regarding having "pure native skills", I'm actually writing the app using the Apache Flex SDK for mobile, which does not require this.

We've used this platform very successfully for other event apps. This allows porting of a single code base to the major mobile platforms without having to write any ObjectiveC/Java/Swift. What I am doing is writing a "native extension" that allows Flex to call ANY Liferay mobile SDK functions (roughly similar to a how plugins are used in the Cordova platform). And, I'm building some cool UI components on top of this specifically for surfacing LR functionality on the mobile (native) side.

It's extremely fast and flexible, allows pixel-by-pixel UI even on different mobile platforms.