Liferay 7 : Module Framework (OSGi)

Hello Friends,

I am sure you would be happy to see Liferay in some new way of development rather than just what you are doing currently.

Yes I am talking about Liferay 7.

I know very few people aware that LIFERAY is going to launch new version of Liferay (Liferay 7) very soon(May be early months of 2016).

LRNAS-2015

Before I provide few details about Liferay 7 feature and changes, let me share some of my experience with LRNAS-2015. I actually get a good chance to meet many liferay folks including Liferay staff members. So Thank you LIFERAY community manager James Falkner to give me a chance to attend this forum as a part of active community member.

Guys, this was really amazing experience and had good knowledge base discussion at the same location.There were lots of sessions and workshops had been organized by LIFERAY and some of them was really rocking and very useful.

Friends,
Be ready to see some good changes in Liferay 7 as I heard and attend some workshop from Liferay Symposium. Liferay 7 comes up with OSGi based Module Framework.

Liferay’s module framework makes it easier than ever for developers to create Liferay applications and to Liferay Customization!

How it would be helpful to Liferay Developer :

• Easier to manage dependencies across module or plugin level
• And the most interesting feature is,Modules can be installed and uninstalled during running server itself and no need to bounce the server.
• module versionoing will helpful developers to reduce/stop class conflict for individual version of modules
• Deployment would be quit easy once you understand the build and deployment process through blade tool
• Service contract are loosely coupled. It means, services can be publish and consume from service registry.
• Its very fast due to small and secure with small package/bundle.
• One more interesting stuff here is, during development you dont need to be dependent on Liferay SDK untill and unless your module or individual project follows Liferay's OSGi standards.
• In-short, this new framework will give very good flexibility to developer for the development and will increase productivity as well. 

Liferay 6.2 and Liferay 7

You would be thinking that how the old plugin creation approach works using Liferay 7. So yes 

Liferay 7 actually supports both the implementation still for backward compatibility.

• You can still create the portlet in older fashion the way which you were doing with Liferay 6.2 by following JSR-286 standards and creating WAR files for deployment.

• With Liferay 7, It simply creates a jar file as it follows module framework architecture. and this is the recommended approach for your new application development.

But yes here you would have to be familiar with OSGi standards and understand the module and component framework here.

Module:

Module is something which is group of Java classes, other optional resources, and a MANIFEST.MF file, packaged together as into a  single JAR file. Liferay 7 uses three modules/bundles.

Modules can have multiple components.

Component:

Component is nothing but implementation of interface like the way we were doing with *LocalServiceImpl class in older fashion. So here what you need to do is, you just will have to load components through annotations in implementation class.These loaded/declared components would be part of modules.

Here Lifecycle of modules and component will be handled through Liferay's OSGi based module framework.

Yoooooooooooo Did you visit our cool snaps on http://www.liferaysolution.com/2015/11/liferay-symposium-2015.html