Updated 6.1 Development Guide

Along with Liferay Portal 6.1 GA2 and the Marketplace launch, we're excited to bring you more good stuff in the Development Guide! Engineers have been busy contributing documentation expanding coverage of features in the guide.

As momentum continues to build for Liferay Marketplace, you can start developing your apps now. The new Liferay Marketplace chapter addresses app development, how to publish your apps, and explains how to maintain and update your apps. Thank you James Falkner for contributing this new chapter.

Of course, as you publish apps to the Marketplace and download cool apps to try out in your portal, you'll want to make sure that the resources on your portal stay properly secure. Liferay's Plugin Security Manager gives you peace of mind for apps downloaded from the Marketplace. It makes sure that app plugins you deploy have access only to the resources they specify up-front. Marketplace developers need to know that each Marketplace plugin must have a Portal Access Control List (PACL). In our Marketplace documentation, you'll learn about the Plugin Security Manager and how it enforces each plugin's PACL, and you can follow steps that help you specify PACLs for your app plugins. Each PACL property is explained, so you know exactly what to declare about your app, qualifying it for distribution in Liferay Marketplace.

In addition to Marketplace related content, we have some new details from Igor Spasić on JSON Web Services and the new JSON Web Services Invoker. By using the JSON Web Service Invoker, you can optimize your use of web services, binding together data from separate objects, filtering service results, and batching together your service calls. Check out the JSON Web Services section for complete details.

As I mentioned, there are also several development features we've been itching to write about. And we have them for your now!

  • Layout template development – Create your own custom layouts leveraging Liferay Development Studio's Layout Template Editor. Included are steps that show you how to embed commonly used portlets right in your layout templates.

  • Message Bus API – Use the Message Bus to exchange messages within Liferay. Message Bus facilitates loose coupling between message producers and consumers and is easy to use. You can do synchronous and asynchronous messaging, and dispatch messages serially or in-parallel.

  • Liferay Developer Studio – Take advantage of Liferay Developer Studio or Liferay IDE in your plugin development. You'll find Studio screen shots and instructions throughout the Dev Guide as we've made Studio an integral part of all development sections on each of the plugin types.

We'll continue to incorporate content to help you develop on Liferay Portal. And, you too can contribute to our Dev Guide and other documents on Github at https://github.com/liferay/liferay-docs. Check out the README file and the guidelines that describe how to contribute. Thanks in advance!

I'd like to give a special thanks to Rich Sezov, Cody Hoag, Jesse Rao, Stephen Kostas, and Mark Healy for their efforts and contributions to our latest Development Guide.