IBA CZ Extlet and Liferay Ext Plugin

IBA CZ developed development and runtime environment Extlet for Liferay portal. The Extlet outperforms the standard Extension Environment for Liferay 5. The Liferay corporation inspired by this Extlet created a new Ext Plugin for the Liferay 6 (the old EXT Environment is now deprecated). The Extlet is now released as open source, thus everyone can use it for free.

Overview

The EXT is an endless source of nightmares for every developer who ever tried to extend standard Liferay’s functionality. One of the most obtrusive problem is waiting. Man-hours are flowing while code is being compiled and deployed. Even a small change of code can take from tens of seconds to minutes of waiting while the whole EXT is being deployed and the server restarted. In addition there can be only one monolithic EXT for the whole portal containing all the code. To put it simply, development of large projects on top of the EXT can be really frustrating for developers, not to mention continuous integration that remains only a dream of your QA department.

Benefits

What was the nightmare with EXT, with Extlet is easy.

Extlet is "component-able"

Every module should have its package (WAR file) that can be deployed separately. There is no more one monolithic EXT, every piece of functionality can be packaged in its own module and WAR file. This feature significantly decreases the compilation and deployment time of every Extlet.

There is almost no need to restart the Tomcat container during development

One of Extlet’s components fixes bugs in the Liferay preventing the portal from reload. Now, when deploying Extlet, the Tomcat Liferay application is automatically reloaded and you can see the changes without need to stop and start the Tomcat. This functionality should not be installed to the production system, there might be various problems when running in production.

Extlet encapsulates more Liferay Plugins into one package

There can be many components inside one Extlet (war) package. Along with the core changes the Extlet can contain plugins like portlets, hooks or web apps. This enables the Extlet to bundle most of the project scenarios into one WAR package. Moreover, third party JARs can be placed inside the package and deployed to Tomcat - you can use your favourite framework for development.

Extlet is easy to reuse

Now, when every component has its sources in one package, you can just take the WAR file from one customer installation and deploy it in other customer’s environment. It is that easy.

Extlet is a transparent part of the Liferay Plugins Repository

Every Extlet can be placed inside the Liferay Software Plugins Repository. When your portal is Extlet-enabled, you can download Extlets the same way as themes, portlets or other plugins. With this possibility you can distribute patches and new versions of plugins to your customers or to public through a company repository.

Extlet adopts maintainability

When deploying a small change, there is no need to redeploy the whole portal with all modules. The only thing you must deploy is a small package with fixed functionality. This minimizes time needed for fix & deploy.

Extlet aims at continous integration

Extlets are built using Maven. Among other benefits, Maven can reduce time needed for setting up things like hot-deploy, automatic build & deployment & test cycle or nightly builds.

Extlet is Open-Sourced

Extlet is available at http://github.com/topolik/extlet under the MIT licence. Project contains the runtime environment extlet-setup, extlet-archetype that simplifies creation of new Extlets with Maven and extlet-tomcat-reload component for portal reload inside the Tomcat container.