The Liferay portal has always been a popular basis for Vaadin applications, so for this year’s Liferay Symposium we wanted to publish some fresh learning material - especially for new Vaadin developers. We created a full-stack example portlet, published a couple of smaller tricks for Liferay developers and created a new web page to act as a hub for essential Liferay + Vaadin information - for both new and existing Vaadin developers.
Liferay + Spring Data + Vaadin
Instead of just small code examples and “hello world” style getting started apps, we wanted to show a new inspiring full stack recipe to create Vaadin portlets. Full stack examples are often a bit opinionated, but we believe this is one of the best ways to build modern portlets for your business. And if it doesn’t suit your requirements as such, it can be a source of inspiration for your perfect stack.
On the persistency layer we rely on JPA entities, repository pattern and an awesome tool called Spring Data JPA that helps us create the data access code in a snap.
The example project and a related article also show how you can use the recently introduced Vaadin Spring to make your Vaadin UI objects Spring managed beans. This naturally helps you to integrate with things like Spring Data repositories, but it may also greatly improve your UI code quality, if you master all IoC tricks that Spring core allows you to apply.
In the example, we are using the User object provided by Liferay’s sign-in functionality and show how you can do loose coupling with the user data provided by Liferay and the separate Spring Data managed database.
Boost your productivity with Vaadin Designer
If you have visited vaadin.com lately, you must have seen the latest addition to Pro Tools called Vaadin Designer. With Vaadin Designer you’ll be able to create stunning user interfaces - faster. Vaadin Designer works out of the box with your Vaadin Liferay portlets, as long as you are using a modern 7.5 series version of Vaadin.
From the Spring Data based “Vaadin reference portlet” we also created a version that uses Vaadin Designer to create its most complex view. For Liferay developers, checking out this project and trying out Vaadin Designer is a new entry to the top of your todo list!
Liferay compatible Valo parameters
To complement our full-stack portlet example, we wanted to brag a bit with our Valo theme engine. With just a couple of parameters you can configure it to perfectly match with the latest Liferay 6.2 default theme. Even if you have customized your portal theme to fit into your company’s brand, the tutorial will help you to easily adapt your Vaadin apps to it, as well.
Visit our booth in Liferay Symposium
If you happen to be in Chicago this week, meet our experts at the Vaadin booth - they’ll be happy to help you more with Vaadin + Liferay development and give you a demonstration of the brand new Vaadin Designer.