LRNAS2015 left me cautiously craving a 7.0 upgrade

LRNAS2015 was everything I hoped it would be. Every session was packed with demos of upcoming 7.0 features that left anyone using 6.2 very grateful (I was) that they weren't on an even older version. Upgrading for 6.2 won't go unaided, but will require some careful planning and testing.

Here is a small slice of new features I am looking forward to with equal parts interest and caution.

  • Senna.js as Liferay's in-portlet SPA framework. New York University extended Senna for their entire portal experience.
  • Switch to osgi bundles. Expect JSP hooks to break on an upgrade. There is the promise of a Liferay 7 Upgrade Assistant that will ease the conversion of such hooks into OSGI modules. There will be support for migration of velocity templates as well. Still recommended to manually rewrite any JSP hooks as portlet modules to prepare for an upgrade to 7.0
  • Benefits of upgrading portlets to OSGI modules: true hot deploy, true sharing of the same classloader
  • Liferay IDE 3 will make a shift from plugins to modules
  • Liferay IDE 3 deploys modules to OSGI container directly. LARs will be replaced by WABs (Web Application Bundles).
  • Brand new Forms content type with support for multi-page forms. There are also plans in the future to incorporate workflows into the forms.
  • New Alloy Editor is impressive, to say the least, with WYSIWYG editing that delivers.
  • Elastic search replacing lucene, faster search performance, recommended to run in its own JVM.
  • Search API has changed. This tells me I need to encapsulate the calls we make into the 6.2 Search API in a facade to insulate our portlets from this change.
  • Faceted search will support the selection of multiple values for a given facet. (Facets in 6.2 only allow the selection of one value within a facet.)

I'll be looking out for any 7.0 Upgrade Checklists that emerge in the coming months. 

The other vendor products that caught my fancy were Valamis for VLE and Dynatrace for performance monitoring. The Vaadin 7 demo was eye-popping and would be my framework choice if we ever need to do a dashboard style application.