We just released latest version of blade cli that includes all of the new npm frontend project templates. This also bumps the rest of the project templates to use latest versions of Liferay gradle and Liferay workspace plugins.

To update simply do $ blade update or for those that haven't installed blade yet, follow the guide here:

https://dev.liferay.com/develop/tutorials/-/knowledge_base/7-0/installing-blade-cli

Then you can update to the latest using the  $ blade update command.  If you receive the following error when you try to execute blade update:

That means that your blade executable is too old and you will need to perform the update this way:

$ (sudo) jpm install -f https://releases.liferay.com/tools/blade-cli/latest/blade.jar

After that point, you can just use blade update command going forward.

Also, we have released all new maven archetypes as well, which you can see a full list here.

Hello all,

First off I wanted to let everyone know that we have released a new milestone for Liferay IDE 3.1 You can install it into your Eclipse using below updatesite below:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/milestone/

For full list of download see this page.

Code Upgrade Tool

Its been awhile since we have released a new update to Liferay IDE, but it isn't because we haven't been building stuff :).  Actually we have been working hard on a new Code Upgrade Tool that will easy upgrades from Liferay Portal 6.2 to Liferay 7.0/DXP specifically helping developers upgrade projects to 7.0.  Since this new upgrade tool is brand new we are rolling it out in several milestones, with the first one having support for upgrading Liferay 6.2 Plugins SDK projects to 7.0 either using new Liferay Workspace based on new gradle plugins or legacy 7.0 Plugins SDK.

Integrated into the Code Upgrade Tool is a better way to find all of the places in your code that you need to migrate to 7.0 APIs.  We now search through your code as compared to our own published "Breaking Changes" list and find instances, mark them with Eclipse markers, where you were using those now broken API calls.  Then we either can fix it for you automatically or give you contextual documentation that will help you manually resolve the issue.

Maven Support

We now have new Maven support for new Liferay Module Project Wizard.  One of the newest project template types is the theme template which supports building themes using new maven plugins.   Along with the new maven plugins, new m2e project lifecycles have been added to seemlessly support new Liferay 7.0 maven plugins such as css-builder and theme-builder (more on those in a later blog)

Along with maven support we have added many new templates available from Blade CLI version 2.0 (more info on this in later blog post)

We have added back the "New Liferay Module Fragment" wizard that makes it easier to create OSGi fragments based on existing Liferay modules.

Gradle Dependency Help

If you have some code in one of your Liferay modules that needs to import a package from a Liferay module that is deployed to your server, but you aren't for sure which artifact and version that it comes from, we now offer a quick fix for those packages that come from Liferay and we can automatically add the correct gradle dependency for that.

Since Liferay developers can now write modular applications using OSGi, many developers will be writing new DS Components.  So we are trying to make this process easier with code assist and code templates for editing DS component classes.  More on both of these features will show up in future blog posts.

Updates and Feedback

Stay tuned for more updates regarding Code Upgrade Tool in Milestone-2 as we will be adding Maven support for Code Upgrade Tool (so that maven plugins can be more easily upgraded to 7.0)

If you run into any issues or have any suggestions please come find us on our community forums and ask a question, we are always around to try to help you out.

Good luck and let us here from you!

The latest stable version of Liferay IDE 3.0.0 GA1 that supports Liferay 7 and OSGi/modular development has been released.  

For those that have installed Liferay IDE stable version, if you are using Eclipse 4.4 or greater can simple "Check for Updates".  Otherwise you can use the following updatesite URL:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/stable/

Visit this page if you want other downloads including Eclipse packages with Liferay IDE pre-installed.  

Release Highlights

1. Liferay 7 Server support

   1. Tomcat

   2. Wildfly

   3. Open Gogo shell action

   4. Publishing uses OSGi Deployment

2. Liferay Module Project support (Gradle only right now)

   1. Create new Liferay Modules stand alone and apart of Liferay workspace

   2. Import one or more existing Liferay modules (gradle only right now)

   3. Gradle commands support

3. Liferay Workspace Support

   1. Create new Liferay Workspace projects

   2. Import existing projects

4. New Liferay Component Class Wizard

5. Liferay Plugins SDK 7 support

6. Migration tool (Find Liferay 7 breaking API changes)

7. Miscellaneous bug fixes

Release Notes

1. Java 8 required

2. IDE 3.0.0 is compatible with 6.2 and 7.0 CE, no support for 6.0 and 6.1

3. One (Eclipse) workspace per one Plugins SDK
   If you need to work with multiple Plugins SDKs at one time you will need to launch a separate Eclipse workspace

 Known Issues

1. For many of the new compnent templates in the New Liferay Component Wizard, the gradle dependencies will need to be manually updated.

2. If add the new dependencies in build.gradle, you need to manually refresh the gradle project to update the dependencies.
   Right-click at project and select Gradle->Refresh Gradle Project

If you run into any issues, please report them on JIRA (IDE project) or here in the community forums.  Thanks and happy developing with Liferay 7.

Hello all, I apologize it has taken so long to release a new version of Liferay IDE that supports Liferay 7 development.  But today we are pleased to announce the first milestone release for Liferay IDE 3.0.  And to quote a famous first line of a movie recently released:  "This will begin to make things right."

For Eclipse Luna (4.4) and Mars (4.5), you can install from following updatesite URL:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/milestone/

If you are interested in downloading a Mars.1 + Liferay IDE bundle you can find those on the Liferay IDE downloads page. 

New Features in Liferay IDE 3.0 M1

Liferay 7 Server Support

Now you can setup and run/debug Liferay 7 servers.  Note that this supports all Liferay 7.x bundles, including non-tomcat bundles.

Also the server publishing of modules has been improved to directly publish bundles to the module framework in Liferay portal since webapp deployment is no longer supported going forward, all modules (even wars) will be installed via the module framework.  During development if you have deployed any modules, any changes you make to the bundle, on save of the file, the bundle will be immediately rebuilt and reinstalled into the running Liferay 7 module framework.

Once you have launched Liferay 7 server, and you want to interact with OSGi runtime you can do that with the new Gogo shell integration.

Liferay 7 Module Dev Support

In Liferay 7 the new method of extending / customizing Liferay is through modules (OSGi bundles).  So in Liferay IDE we have added support for developing these modules through New Project wizards, recognizing both gradle and maven based module projects, and deploying these modules to Liferay 7.

New Liferay Module Project Wizard

In this wizard you can create new individual module projects based on different templates.  For 3.0 M1 only "gradle" type of modules can be created.  We are working on maven versions that should be ready 3.0 GA.

The 2nd page of the wizard gives you ability to customize the Java class that will be the DS Component class.

If you choose "service" as the module template then on this page you can specify which "service" you are trying to implement.  This is useful for implementing on of the many OSGi integration points for extending Liferay 7 UI.

Gradle / Maven bundle projects

We have included Gradle support through Eclipse Buildship plugin that is bundled with Liferay IDE.  Maven bundle project support is via the Eclipse m2e plugin (also available as a Liferay IDE feature).  

For a bundle project that uses gradle, you can import it with the File > Import > Gradle project.  Any gradle project that applies either the Liferay gradle plugin or bnd builder gradle plugin will be recognized as a "Liferay 7 module".

Maven projects that use either "maven-bundle-plugin" or "bnd-maven-plugin" are recognized as "Liferay 7 module" projects.  

Any project that is a "Liferay 7 bundle" can be published (deployed) to Liferay 7 server in the servers view.  And for each resource in the bundle that is modified in the IDE, the bundle will immediately be rebuilt and reinstalled into Liferay 7 module framework.

Future Blog posts

There are many new development tools related to Liferay IDE and Liferay 7 that I would like to show you but I want to split that out into a few other blog posts, call it a series... :)

• Liferay IDE and "Workspaces"
• Introducing blade cli tool
• Legacy plugin sdks projects in Liferay IDE 3
• Migration tools for Liferay 6.2 projects

As always find us on the forums if you have questions or suggestions or bugs (warning this is milestone there are going to be some!)

Just a quite notice that we have pushed a new release of Liferay IDE version 2.2.1 that just pushes a few fixes for the latest major release including a nasty memory, GC bug here that would affect anyone with portal-source open in their workspace.  Also this release prepares us for the upcoming Liferay Developer Studio 2.2 release which will be available on December 1st.

Also now Eclipse Luna SR1 (4.4.1) is out we need to let everyone know about a bug that slipped into that release that affects Liferay IDE 2.2 users that use IvyDE.  See details here: https://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/45837395

TL;DR

Install/Update below (link leads to protected page, but it works in Eclipse)

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/stable/

Full downloads can be found here.

For Ecipse 4.4.1 users, install the E4 RCP patch here:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.4

More details found here.

Thanks all.

The Liferay IDE team is pleased to annouce the latest release version 2.2.  Use the updatesite below to update your existing install or install for the first time.

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/stable/

*Note* if you have previously installed Liferay IDE and just do "check for updates" you will not be able to install the new AlloyUI features those are available as a separate feature, see below.

For bundles that contain Eclipse Luna + Liferay IDE 2.2 pre-installed go here: https://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-projects/liferay-ide

JavaScript / AlloyUI

We are very excited about this release because we have finally for the first time have some real AlloyUI support along with the brand new JavaScript development support features.  In order to give Eclipse developers the type of JavaScript coding support that they have come to expect from the java tools, we have integrated a new framework called tern.java which bundles liferay and aui plugins for tern.  

TL;DR type inference for AUI rocks!

Not only AUI but YUI types as well

Also jQuery is supported as well and AlloyUI4 support will be added in IDE 3.0

Liferay JavaScript object

And also commonly used javascript anonymous functions has type inferrencing

See a lot more screenshots and details of these new JavaScript / AlloyUI features on this page.

AlloyUI Feature

In order to use these new features you have to make sure to select the new top level feature on the update site when you install this release:

Go here to see description of all the new features related to AlloyUI and JavaScript support.

Portlet Development UX

Recently our team ate our own dog food and developed a few portlets for internal use and we found ourselves wanting some new features that would make portlet development more productive so we've added many new features targeted at portlet development.  Most of those revolve around improvements we made to the Eclipse JSP editor to support Liferay portlet dev features. 

<aui:script> tag support, now finally good javascript support in a JSP!

Quick-fix and quick assist for portlet resource bundles

Fix one or fix several with just a few clicks

If you want to fix more than one of the same warning just select all and fix at once

Or invoke quick assist (ctrl+1) and never show the popup dialog

Portlet action method completion

Quick assist here as well

There are too many of those features to list them all here so we created a special page for all the noteworthy portlet development features here.

New Editors

All of our XML editors have been redesigned to open very fast, as fast as the plain text editor. Try it for a spin and feel the difference. Also, for this release we have several new specialized eclipse editors, for portal.properties and portal-ext.properties, liferay-portlet.xml, and a improved layout template editor that supports 6.2 style layouts finally!

Server Portal-ext.properties editor

liferay-portlet.xml editor

Improved Layout Template Editor design page

More screenshots of new editors are available here.

Other Features

Many eclipse developer have multiple workspaces, but it is a pain to have to re-define each of your SDKs, runtimes and servers for each of those workspaces.  Now when you open a new workspace you will see a notification popup informing you that you can import all of your Liferay settings(not projects) from the previous workspace is you would like. HT to Kamesh for the initial code contribution.

To see the rest of the "other" features added to this release see this page.

Special Thanks

Thanks so much to the other members of the IDE team in China: Ashley, Vicky, Kuo, Lilu, Simon, Terry, XuYing, and Eric (recently joined so he isn't in the photo) who worked so hard on this release.  Also thanks to all of those community members who submitted bug reports and feedback.  A special mention goes out to Angelo Zerr the author of the tern.java and eclipse-wtp-xml-search plugins that we have integrated in this latest release giving Liferay developer lots of new goodies to play with.  Please give us feedback or let us know what problems you may be running into over on our forums.  Good luck!

A new release of Liferay IDE has been made available today, version 2.1.1.  You can update or install the new release here as usual:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/stable/

Or go over to the download page and grab one of the bundles that includes Eclipse Luna JavaEE package with Liferay IDE 2.1.1 pre-installed: 

https://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-projects/liferay-ide

Some release highlights include:

• New Improved Liferay Project wizard
• Better Vaadin7 support
• Better Java8 support
• Minor improvements to liferay-maven-plugin support
• Initial support for web-type plugins
• Eclipse Luna support

Full list of issues can be see here.  Actually we have had several releases of Liferay IDE since my last blog post.  I'll try to do a better job of keeping you up2date in the future.  We have some exciting things planned for Liferay IDE 2.2, namely, better AlloyUI/JavaScript support!

I'd like to annouce that we have pushed a new release of Liferay IDE 2.0 Milestone 3 to the milestones updatesite.  

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/milestone/

Since this is an Eclipse updatesite you must add this in the Help > Install New Software... dialog.

This is the 3rd milestone release (See this blog entry for highlights of the 2.0.0M1 release.) as we approach 2.0.0 GA1 release which should happen very soon in next week or so.

M3 Release Highlights

• Brand New Liferay Plugin Project Wizard supporting both Ant (PluginsSDK) and Maven (liferay-maven-plugin) projects
• Resolution generation for common m2e-liferay pom.xml errors
• ecj.jar automatically added to Eclipse ant runtime (no more ecj.jar warnings in console :)
• Over 135 bug fixes, enhancements and improvements

Brand New Liferay Plugin Project Wizard

The biggest new feature of M3 is the new completely re-written New Liferay Plugin Project Wizard that provides two big new features 1) Maven project support for projects using liferay-maven-plugin, 2) Freestyle SDK project (you can create SDK projects at any desired location)

Maven project support

With the new Liferay Plugin Project Wizard in M3 you can select a different build type: Maven

Once you have selected Maven you can specify maven options like artifact version and top level package. Also there is a place for you to associate Maven profiles to activate on your project that most developers will use to attach developer machine specific properties like the Liferay version or local Liferay bundle properties.

Flexible project location support in Plugins SDK

Now in the latest version of Plugins SDK you can create projects that live outside of the Plugins SDK folder structure.  In the new Liferay Plugin Project Wizard you can activate this feature two ways 1) selecting to not Use Default location and specifying your own location

2) Toggling the option to "Use Eclipse workspace as base location" toggle button.

Feedback

We really need the communities help in providing feedback on this milestone release.  Especially issues involved in migrating from IDE 1.6.x projects, or using Maven and Ivy enabled projects.  Post issues to Liferay IDE Forums or the JIRA project. Thanks!

We here on the IDE team are pleased to announce the new release of Liferay IDE: Liferay IDE 2.0 Milestone 1.  Since this is an Eclipse release all you need is to use the following update site url in the Help > Install New Software... dialog.

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/milestone/

Release Highlights

• 6.2.0 Beta Liferay Portal CE support
• Support for Liferay Maven projects (m2e-liferay)
• Support for Plugin SDK projects that use Ivy (IvyDE integration)
• Freemarker debugger for theme templates
• Over 200 bug fixes, enhancements and improvements

Milestone Releases

Liferay Portal 6.2 Support

Liferay Maven Project Support - New m2e-liferay Feature

Ivy support for Plugins SDK projects

In the latest version of the portal 6.1.2, 6.1.30, and upcoming 6.2.0 Ivy support has been added to the Plugins SDK.  So now some of the projects created by SDK will come with their own ivy.xml file for dependency management along with the common infrastructure for Ivy (cache dir) residing in the root of the Plugins SDK.  In order for these projects to work full in Eclipse (all classes compile) we need to enable Ivy dependency management for Eclipse.  This is going to be accomplished by integrating the great work by the IvyDE team, using their plugin for Eclipse (IvyDE) to support Ivy enabled Liferay plugin projects. 

Theme Improvements

Freemarker Debugger

Included in the 2.0M1 release is a new feature for debugging Freemarker templates executed for Liferay theme plugins.  This feature creates a Freemarker debugger client integrated with Eclipse debug view.  When you launch a Liferay Portal 6.2 Server in "Debug" mode it will automatically enable the embedded Freemarker debugger.  Then you can add breakpoints to any FTL file that is opened with the Liferay Freemarker Editor.  When the Portal evaluates those FTL templates it will pause execution and activate the debug view Eclipse.  

You can then inspect variables, step, resume as you would expect in normal java debugger.  

Also you can suspend the calling Java thread in order to see the stacktrace from Liferay that calls into the Freemarker template engine.  

Other highlights

• Various Layout Template Visual Editor improvements
• Remote server adapter supports proxy servers
• Portlet wizard now supports adding portlets to Control Panel

Feedback

We really need the communities help in providing feedback on this milestone release.  Especially issues involved in migrating from IDE 1.6.x projects, or using Maven and Ivy enabled projects.  Also since the Maven support (m2e-liferay) is in its first version so there are going to be some rough edges to be smoothed out in the upcoming milestone releases.  But the quality will be much better if the community will report issues they have with 2.0M1.  Post issues to Liferay IDE Forums or the JIRA project.

Special Thanks

Before I finished this blog post I wanted to mention a couple of words of thanks.  Firstly, I need to mention my QA team members, Ashley Yuan and Vicky Wang that were in charge of QA for the 2.0M1 release.  They have written lots of UI functional tests and regresion tests the past year as we have been working up to this release.  A massive change in the codebase that this involved would have been impossible with their efforts.  Thanks team!

Also special thanks goes out to a couple of other super-smart engineers, Neil Griffin and Mika Koivisto for all of their help with maven.  Neil for being my maven mentor and Mika for fielding my pull requests and helping me understand the liferay-maven-plugin when both of those guys are super busy and have bigger fish to fry! :)

Serveral weeks ago we updated the Remote IDE Connector application to version 1.0.1.  This new update fixed the issues that we found with the 1.0.0 version of the Remote IDE Connector.  Namely, it works correctly now :)  **Update** I forgot to say thanks to the Marketplace team.  They did a ton of work to improve Marketplace infrastructure to be able to roll out changes to apps that had bug-fixes such as this.  Thanks for everything you do guys!

So Liferay IDE users can now install (or update) this application into their remote portal instances and then setup a new Remote Liferay Portal Server adapter in Liferay IDE to connect to it and use it as a development and deployment target just like they would a local instance of Liferay Portal running on your machine.

To help out new users we've created a special wiki page for now to demostrate how to configurate it.  I hope to get this information moved over to official documentation for Liferay IDE in the near future.  For now if you have any problems with either the Remote IDE Connector or the Liferay Remote Server Adapter be sure to create a new thread in the Liferay IDE Forums.

Today, the Liferay IDE team has released Liferay IDE 1.6.2.  This release is minor release that only fixes a couple of issues found with Eclipse Juno SR compatibility.  So if you are using Eclipse Juno SR2 or want to upgrade, you will need to upgrade or install Liferay IDE 1.6.2 first from the normal updatesite URL:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/stable

Stay tuned to this blog for more updates related to Liferay IDE, namely  Remote IDE connector update and also some news about upcoming 2.0-Milestone-1 version of Liferay IDE that will have Liferay Portal 6.2 milestone server adapter support and also support for projects built with the Liferay Maven Plugin SDK. :)

If you run into any issues, please let us know on our forums.  Thanks!

Today we are pleased to announce the latest release of Liferay Developer Studio version 1.6.0.  Here on my blog I usually just cover Liferay IDE releases, so just to bring everyone up to speed, Liferay Developer Studio is our own branded Eclipse-based product that is built on top of Liferay IDE along with some additional enterprise features (e.g. WebSphere server adapter).  It also contains the latest versions of Liferay Portal EE and Plugins SDK bundled and pre-configured to work out of the box.

The most notable features for this latest 1.6.0 release are:

• Kaleo Designer for Java - Eclipse-based visual designer for Kaleo workflows that is specifically geared for Java developers (see more details below).
• Liferay Portal 6.1 EE GA2 support - Bundled latest versions of Liferay Portal 6.1 EE GA2 along with Plugins SDK and sample projects.
• Liferay IDE 1.6.x - bug fixes from community editon release

If you're ready to give it a try, you can download a trial version here.

Kaleo Designer for Java

Liferay Portal EE already contains a visual Kaleo workflow designer built-in to the Kaleo Forms application.  However, we wanted to create a new tool directly targeted at back-end Java developers, so we decided to add this to our Eclipse-based dev environment, Liferay Developer Studio.  The Kaleo Designer for Java is a multi-page editor that allows editing of Kaleo workflows either as a visual diagram or a XML source editor.  There are also related tools, wizards, and property views, content-assist associated with this visual editor that most Eclipse Java developers have become accustomed to with other tooling.    The biggest productivity enhancements for Java developers in this version is the integration of the Java/Groovy script editor for editing Kaleo workflow action and condition scripts and the Freemarker/Velocity template editor for creating notofication templates.

There will be more available articles and extended documentation about the Kaleo Designer for Java in the upcoming weeks, but for now, instead of posting a lot of screenshots, we decided to record a short demo video instead.
http://vimeo.com/48315976

If you are a Java developer and need to create a new or modiify an existing workflow process in Liferay,  I hope you will give Kaleo Designer for Java a try.
 

• http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/stable/

• Eclipse Indigo (3.7.x) : http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/indigo/stable/
• Eclipse Helios (3.6.x): http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/helios/stable/

Automated source attachment for Liferay Portal classes

Added support for supported JSF Component Suites

Zoom, Print, Save as Image actions available for Service Builder Diagrams

Whats next for Liferay IDE?

What up next for Liferay IDE project is version 2.0, which should bring remote portal structured content editing, the much-awaited Maven support along with some better theme development support.  If you want to help with testing these new 2.0 features, just add the Juno nightly build URL below:

• http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/nightly/

** requires nightly build of 6.1.1 portal and 6.1.1 SDK after Jun 21

Hello everyone,

Eclipse Juno (3.8/4.2) is scheduled to be released today (June 27th).  However, the current stable build of Liferay IDE (1.5.3) is not compatible with Eclipse Juno.  It will be a few more days before I can create a new stable build of Liferay IDE (1.6.0) since there are a few remaining issues that need to be resolved.

However, in the meantime we are going to make a Juno compatible build of Liferay IDE available on the nightly build updatesite.  Here is the new one that you can use for Juno (updatesite should be available by the 27th).

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/nightly/

Please report any issues or regressions that you find in Liferay IDE features for Eclipse Juno either in JIRA under IDE project or in the Liferay IDE forums.  

Thanks everyone!

1. Open Eclipse
2. Make sure that the Liferay IDE updatesite is enabled: http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/indigo/stable/
3. Help > Check for Updates...
4. Apply the update for the new 1.5.3 release

For new Liferay IDE installations...

• Download an Eclipse pre-bundled with Liferay IDE 1.5.3
• Install new from updatesite: http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/indigo/stable/

1. Create a new theme project
2. Deploy to Liferay Tomcat Server through Add/Remove Modules dialog...
3. Make a change in the _diffs folder under docroot/
4. Liferay IDE detected this change and would invoke a "ant compile" in the background for the theme
   This would copy hundreds of files into the root of the docroot folder (to full compile the theme from the declared parent)
5. Liferay IDE would publish the delta changes to the docroot of the project out into the webapps/ folder in Tomcat
6. Tomcat would detect these changes and redeploy if it saw changes to descriptor files (web.xml)
7. View the theme in the Portal
8. Make another change to any _diffs resource
9. "ant compile" is re-invoked and all of the changed files are deployed to tomcat webapps/ folder once again.
10. Tomcat may redeploy and restart the context
11. Refresh the browser to see the change to the theme.

1. Create a new theme project
2. During the creation of the project the theme is pre-compiled so it doesn't wait on the auto-compile to happen from first change to _diffs
3. Deploy to Liferay Tomcat Server through Add/Remove Modules dialog...
4. View the theme in the Portal
5. Now when changes are made to _diffs/**/* resource, Liferay IDE detects this change and just copies the single small delta change into the docroot parent.
6. Auto-publish event is triggered for the Liferay Tomcat server and this same small delta update is made to the theme published in the webapps/ folder in tomcat.  Tomcat does not redeploy or restart the context single only a small change (single css or tempalte file) was modified.
7. Refresh the page in the browser to see the update in the portal

Nimen Hao! (Hi Y'all!),

• Liferay Hook Configuration Editor
• Support for importing Liferay binary plugins as new projects
• JSP Debugging for projects deployed to Remote Liferay Servers
• Support for Glassfish as a Remote Liferay Server (through server-manager-web Liferay plugin)

I'd like to mention one of the new features in the upcoming release of Liferay 6.1, which is the remote development and deployment support from Liferay IDE.  The idea is that with this feature you can build Liferay projects in Liferay IDE like normal but instead of the Liferay server running locally it is running on a remote host.  This is accomplished through two things, 1) new remote server adapter in Liferay IDE and 2) Server manager plugin (new in 6.1) deployed to the remote Liferay server 

This feature will be officially available with the Liferay 6.1 CE release, but since it is only in beta, now is a good time to try it out and give feedback.

For those who wish to try this out here are the steps to setting it up.

1. Download the Liferay Portal 6.1 Beta4 Tomcat bundle (Only tomcat is supported in beta4,  both JBoss and Glassfish will be supported by 6.1 GA release)

2. Start Tomcat bundle on remote host (or even localhost)

3. Download the Server Manager plugin for 6.1 Beta4 (This plugin provides the API needed by Liferay IDE to administer remote plugins)

4. Deploy Server Manager plugin into remote Tomcat server

5. Install the latest stable or nightly version of Liferay IDE (links are updatesite URLs to use in Eclipse install manager)

6. Create a new server in Liferay IDE, File > New > Server > Liferay > Remote Liferay Server

7. Specify a local tomcat bundle for the runtime stub (this is needed for libraries to compile project)

8. Specify the IP address of remote tomcat server along with Omni admin username/password

Once you have done this you should see the server console log messages printed in the normal Eclipse console view.

9. Create and deploy Liferay projects as usual then publish (deploy) them to the server, see Liferay IDE getting started guide for a walkthrough of this.

Now when you modify files in your project, every 15 seconds it will publish the delta of any changes to remote server.  However, you can publish changes immediately using the "publish" action in the servers view.  If you want to change the automatic publish rate you can do that in the server configuration editor (double click server in Servers view).

For anyone who decides to try this out and want to give feedback with suggestions or problems please either open a JIRA ticket for the IDE project or enter a new topic on the IDE forums.

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

Hi all,

We just released version 1.4 of Liferay IDE.  Help > Check for updates... is the fastest way if you already have it installed.  If not here is the URL update site:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/indigo/stable/  
(click here for detailed install instructions)

I hope to increase the speed at which we push out new versions of the IDE.  I'd like to have a new release at least every 6-8 weeks.  The next release 1.5 will probably land about mid-november.

I've created a Liferay IDE 1.4 Release page where you can see some details and screenshots about the new release.  Here are the most important new features available in this release:

• Liferay 6.1 Server (Tomcat 7) server adapter
• Portlet Configuration Editor

Liferay 6.1 (nightly/trunk) recently switched to Tomcat 7 so we've now added support for launching Tomcat7 in Liferay IDE with a new server type.  

Also in this new release there is a new portlet configuration editor available by default.  Before showing off any screenshots of the editor, I would like to publically thank a Liferay community member, Kamesh Sampath for contributing the code for this editor.  He volunteered many hours of his own personal time to build it and is committed to make it a first-class editor for Liferay and portlet developers.  Personally it has been a pleasure for me to collaborate with Kamesh over last few weeks working on this editor.  I look forward to seeing more excellent features from him on both Liferay IDE and Lifery Portal in the future.   If you like the new editor, feel free to drop him a note on his profile page.

That is it for now.  I'm actually just about to head to Hong Kong with my familiy this week since its October Holiday here in China and the office is shut down for the week.  I'll be checking the Liferay IDE forums at least one a day to help any users with upgrade issues.  

Liferay IDE 1.3 Now Available to Download

A new stable release of Liferay IDE, version 1.3, is now available now on the stable update-site URL for existing Helios users here:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/helios/stable/

If you already have Liferay IDE installed in Eclipse Helios you can check for updates to pull down the new release.  If you are has Eclipse Indigo installed, here is the stable update-site URL for Indigo:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/indigo/stable/

The detailed installation guide for Liferay IDE can be found here.  However, it has not been updated with the latest URLs for installing 1.3 but you can use either of the URLs above depending on your Eclipse version.

http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.0/development/-/ai/installation

Liferay IDE 1.3 New and Noteworthy

Here are some of the important features that have been released for this release:

• Eclipse Indigo support
• Remote Liferay Server support for deployment, debugging, etc. 
• New Service Builder Editor 
• Vaadin projects now supported for 6.0.x SDKs
• Required deployment context support (More info in upcoming blog)
• Alloy Taglib support
• Better support for Liferay Plugins SDK in workspace

I will be blogging more about each one of these new features in more detail in the days to come.  If you have any installation or upgrade issues please ask me over in the Liferay IDE forums. 

Good luck!