Liferay Mobile SDK Now Available

Today Liferay released the first version of the Liferay Mobile SDK! [Download | Documentation | Project Page]

The Liferay Mobile SDK makes it super-easy for mobile developers to integrate mobile apps with Liferay Portal, by taking care of common tasks like authentication, exception handling, parsing responses, and exposing Liferay's JSON web services in their preferred mobile app development environment (e.g. Objective-C interfaces for iOS developers, Java interfaces for Android, and potentially others in the future). Custom objects and their web services (created via Service Builder) can also be accessed through the Mobile SDK just as easily as core services.

The Liferay Mobile SDK is compatible with Liferay Portal 6.2 and later. The Mobile SDK's official project page gives you access to the SDK releases, provides the latest SDK news, and has forums for you to engage in mobile app development discussions. Bruno Farache also did an excellent blog post for the beta release earlier this year with some working code examples and technical discussion.

Download and Install

There are two ways to get and use the Mobile SDK:

Liferay IDE / Developer Studio / Eclipse Plugin (for Android apps)

For Android developers, Liferay provides the Liferay Mobile SDK Eclipse plugin for you to use in developing your mobile Android apps. It's powerful Mobile SDK Builder generates libraries that enable your app to communicate with Liferay Portal and with the custom portlet services deployed on your Liferay Poral instance. Check out the Developer Guide for details on how to install the plugin into your environment.

Manual Installation (iOS / Android)

For Android and iOS developers, manual installation is pretty simple: download a JAR or ZIP file and import it into your project, either in Eclipse, XCode, or other development environment. The Developer Guide contains details on how to install the SDK into virtually any mobile development environment.

Versioning

Due to the close relationship between the Mobile SDK and Liferay itself, the Mobile SDK follows a similar release version scheme, and each release works with both CE and EE. Multiple Mobile SDKs can also be used in parallel (e.g. to support multiple major Liferay releases in a given app) thanks to the versioning present in the package namespaces.

Source Code

As an open source project, the Liferay Mobile SDK's source code can be found it its main Github repository or as a downloadable zip bundle.

Contributing

Contributions are the lifeblood of our community, and as an open source project, the Mobile SDK is no different. The process for contribution to the SDK is the same process used for Liferay itself. Simply fork the repository, make your contribution, and issue pull requests to the project lead(s). It's a great way to get involved and to give a little back to our community!

Documentation

The Mobile SDK's official documentation lives in the Liferay Developer Guide, covering everything you need to know, including detailed guides for installation and development in both Java (Android) and Objective-C (iOS and XCode) and will be updated as necessary as new features are added or changed.

Getting Support

Support for the Liferay Mobile SDK is included in Liferay's Enterprise Subscription, which provide regular service packs, a commercial SLA, and more.

If you are using Liferay Community Edition, visit the project site or check out the Mobile SDK Forums to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered.

Bug Reporting

Like other Liferay projects, the Mobile SDK project uses issues.liferay.com to report and manage bug and feature requests. If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the Mobile SDK Project and 6.2.0.1 release as the value for the Affects Version/s field.

Feature Requests

If you have a great idea for the next Mobile SDK, be sure to file a Feature Request through the JIRA project or on the Ideas Dashboard (they both go to the same place!). If you have the time, consider contributing your amazing new idea to the project, we in the community would love to see what you've done!

 

 

[Denis Signoretto]

I've seen Mobile SDK uses 4 digits for versioning, (e.g. 6.2.0.1). The last digit what does it stand for ?

[Bruno Farache]

Ciao Denis!

I've added a section to the docs that explains that:

https://github.com/brunofarache/liferay-mobile-sdk/tree/master/android#liferay

I'm not sure yet if that's the best way.

[Raffy Theiss]

I started to read the document first before I will install the software.