Liferay Faces Project News - May 2015

Project News

The Liferay Faces team is hard at work on several projects and I would like to bring you up-to-date with our progress.

Support for Liferay Portal 7.0

In early May I attended the Liferay Core Developers Conference in Madrid. One of my main goals in attending the conference was to gain a more complete understanding of the requirements for supporting OSGi portlets. I believe that this goal was reached and the Liferay Faces team is better prepared to implement these requirements to support JSF developers.

One of the many benefits that OSGi brings to Liferay Portal is increased modularity and the ability to better adhere to Semantic Versioning. In order to take advantage of this, the Liferay Faces project will need to move away from the umbrella project version scheme to individual, semantically versioned modules. Stay tuned for future project news as we make more progress in this area.

Another change for Liferay Portal 7.0 will be AlloyUI migrating from YUI to jQuery. As part of this migration, the corresponding JSF component renderers in Liferay Faces will be refactored to manifest jQuery-based JavaScript. The goal is to make it possible for JSF portlet developers to upgrade their Liferay 6.2 based portlets to Liferay 7.0 portlets with minimal effort.

Support for Liferay Portal 6.2

For most of 2014 and 2015 we have been focussed on developing new JSF components and our new Liferay Faces Showcase. As of the time of this writing, the latest version is 4.2.0-beta and we are working on the following Release Candidates:

  • Liferay Faces 4.2.5-rc1 (JSF 2.2 + Liferay Portal 6.2)
  • Liferay Faces 3.2.5-rc1 (JSF 2.1 + Liferay Portal 6.2)

Since the 4.2.5 and 3.2.5 releases support Liferay Portal 6.2, they include our new JSF components for AlloyUI 2.0 (the version of AlloyUI that comes bundled with the portal).

BTW, did you notice the minor revision jump from 4.2.0-beta to 4.2.5-rc1? For the sake of consistency, we decided on "4.2.5" in order to communicate the concept that the 4.2.x branch (a.k.a. the master branch) is at the same level of maturity as the 3.2.x branch. We did something similar in the past when we released version 3.2.4-ga5 (there had never been a 3.2.3-ga4, 3.2.2-ga3, 3.2.1-ga2, or 3.2.0-ga1 release before). Perhaps now you see why it is so important for us to move to Semantic Versioning with Liferay Portal 7.0, so that we can avoid the complications that our current version scheme can cause.

Support for Liferay Portal 6.1 / 6.0 / 5.2

Bug-fixes that have been committed to the master branch have also been backported to all other branches (as applicable). Although we do not plan release candidates for all branches, our GA6 release will also include:

  • Liferay Faces 3.1.5-ga6 (JSF 2.1 + Liferay Portal 6.1)
  • Liferay Faces 3.0.5-ga6 (JSF 2.1 + Liferay Portal 6.0)
  • Liferay Faces 3.0.5-legacy-ga6 (JSF 2.1 + Liferay Portal 5.2)
  • Liferay Faces 2.2.5-ga6 (JSF 1.2 + Liferay Portal 6.2)
  • Liferay Faces 2.1.5-ga6 (JSF 1.2 + Liferay Portal 6.1)

What's Next?

After the GA6 release, the Liferay Faces team will focus on GA7 which will contain maintenance repairs for GA6 as well as some additional JSF components. We will simultaneously be working towards support for Liferay Portal 7.0 and OSGi-based JSF portlets.