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Today was my first day playing with the Liferay IDE. It is really good! It basically streamlines all the little processes that create friction for Liferay developers and lets you handle everything from Eclipse.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit. Windows x64 was giving me grief with Eclipse, and Java 1.6.21 was also giving me grief with Helios. So here are my recommendations:

1) Use Java 1.6.20. I know that Oracle did come out with an updated 1.6.21 that supposedly works with Eclipse finally, but it's just too much of a hassle. 1.6.20 works like a charm.

2) Download a fresh eclipse. You might have other eclipse installations for your other work or whatever, but get a fresh one just for Liferay dev. That way you don't have to worry about things being screwy because you're sharing eclipse with some other work processes.

3) Use Helios. I did try to use Galileo for some things last week and it wasn't working out. Helios is stable as far as I know, provided you're using Java 1.6.20.

I followed this guide to get my IDE set up. Deploying my hello world portlet took a simple right click on my build file -> Run As... -> Ant Build

It not only deployed to my Liferay, but I was able to open the tomcat which was in my servers tab, and launch Liferay in debug mode *inside* eclipse. The guy next to me was impressed...I was too.

I still have to explore the other benefits of Liferay IDE, but so far so good. You can easily create a hook, ext plugin, or portlet. There are also two greyed-out buttons for themes and layouts. I am pretty excited for those to get un-greyed....