Announcement: Liferay Faces 4.2.0-beta Released

On April 28, 2015 Liferay released Liferay Faces 4.2.0-beta:

Liferay Faces 4.2.0-beta JSF 2.2 + Liferay Portal 6.2 Release Notes

Feature Complete

This new version of Liferay Faces is just about 100% feature complete which is why we decided to advance the version from "milestone" to "beta" status.

New Showcase Components

The Liferay Faces Showcase is hosted at www.liferayfaces.org and features a suite of new Java-based JSF components, many of which utilize AlloyUI and can be used in either webapps or portlets. Here is a list of the new components that have been developed since our 4.2.0-m2 release back in September, 2014:

For more information about our new Component Suite, see Juan Gonzalez' blog post titled New Liferay Faces release - Portal components and Vernon Singleton's blog post titled New Liferay Faces release - The alloy:accordion component.

Support for PrimeFaces 5.2

Thanks to our technology partnership with PrimeTek Informatics, we were able to resolve several portlet-related compatibility issues with PrimeFaces. In addition, we upgraded the new primefaces5-portlet and primefaces5-users-portlet demos to PrimeFaces 5.2.

Download Instructions

Since the 4.2.0-beta release is not General Availability (GA), the JAR artifacts are *not* published at Maven Central. Instead, they are published at the new Liferay Previews Nexus Repository along with the demo portlets.

Maven Project Dependencies

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.liferay.faces</groupId>
    <artifactId>liferay-faces-alloy</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.0-beta</version>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.liferay.faces</groupId>
    <artifactId>liferay-faces-bridge-impl</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.0-beta</version>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.liferay.faces</groupId>
    <artifactId>liferay-faces-portal</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.0-beta</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>
<repositories>
  <repository>
    <id>liferay-previews</id>
    <url>
      https://repository.liferay.com/nexus/content/repositories/liferay-previews
    </url>
  </repository>
</repositories>

Ivy Project Dependencies

<dependencies>
  <dependency org="com.liferay.faces" name="liferay-faces-alloy" rev="4.2.0-beta" />
  <dependency org="com.liferay.faces" name="liferay-faces-bridge-impl" rev="4.2.0-beta" />
  <dependency org="com.liferay.faces" name="liferay-faces-portal" rev="4.2.0-beta" />
</dependencies>
...
<resolvers>
  <ibiblio m2compatible="true" name="liferay-previews"
    root="https://repository.liferay.com/nexus/content/repositories/liferay-previews" />
</resolvers>

Version Scheme

Please refer to the Liferay Faces Version Scheme wiki article for a detailed explanation of the version numbering.

Stability

This 4.2.0-beta release is a technology preview that is suitable for development purposes but should not be used in a production environment. It will not be supported under the Liferay EE subscription until it reaches GA (General Availability) status.

Support For JSF 2.2 and Liferay Portal 6.2

  • This release of Liferay Faces is compatible with JSF 2.2

  • If deploying portlets to Liferay Portal 6.2, then developers should read the new Migrating From Liferay Faces 3.1 to Liferay Faces 3.2/4.2 section in the Developer's Guide. Specifically, JSF portlets require the following option in the WEB-INF/liferay-portlet.xml descriptor: <requires-namespaced-parameters>false</requires-namespaced-parameters>

Tomcat 7 Only

Developed under JSR 344, JSF 2.2 is part of the larger Java EE 7 specification from the JCP. Even though Java EE 7 includes technologies like CDI 1.1 and Servlet 3.1, JSF 2.2 only depends on Java EE 6 technologies like CDI 1.0 and Servlet 3.0. This means that JSF 2.2 webapps and portlets can be deployed in Java EE 6 (Servlet 3.0) servlet containers such as Tomcat 7. However, Java EE 6 full-profile application servers such as GlassFish 3.2, JBoss 7.1, and WebLogic 12c bundle JSF 2.1 and cannot be upgraded to JSF 2.2. At the time of this writing, Liferay, Inc. has not released any Liferay Portal 6.1/6.2 bundles with Java EE 7 servers such as Tomcat 8, GlassFish 4.0 or JBoss/WildFly 8. Therefore this milestone has only been tested for compatibility with Liferay Portal 6.1/6.2 on Tomcat 7.
 

Roadmap

The Liferay Faces team is hard at work adding new components and new features so that we can achieve Release Candidate (RC) status in our next release. Stay tuned!
 

Feedback Requested

If you find any problems with this release, please post a message in the Liferay Faces forums.

Blogs
Hi Neil,

Any update for a new 3.2.x release? As it's been about a year since the previous release and meanwhile, many improvements have been made which are useful in the context of our projects.

Thanks!
Hi Peter, meanwhile GA release is out (that should happen in next weeks) you can use 3.2.5-ga6-SNAPSHOT using this SNAPSHOT repository:

https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/com/liferay/faces

Just take into account this could be risky if using in production environments, as it's not GA yet.
Hi Peter. Juan is correct -- you can try 3.2.5-ga6-SNAPSHOT jars for now. When we release 4.2.0-ga6 (actually we might call it 4.2.5-ga6 for consistency), then we will simultaneously release 3.2.5-ga6.

The reason why we are backporting most of the features from our 4.2.x (JSF 2.2) branch to our 3.2.x (JSF 2.1) branch is because Liferay Portal 6.2 is not currently supported on Java EE 7 app servers (JSF 2.2).
Hi Juan, Neil,

Thanks for the update. I'm well aware that there are SNAPSHOT versions available, but as we're building our projects with Maven, we cannot depend on them. And, like you mentioned, even if we could it would be risky to do so.

Thanks again.
Hi Peter,

We just changed the <version> in the 3.2.x branch pom.xml descriptor to 3.2.5-rc1-SNAPSHOT so that we can provide a release candidate to projects like yours that currently depend on JSF 2.1 and Liferay Portal 6.2.

Kind Regards,

Neil