Sun Web Space training (day 3)

Wednesday, 1 july 2009, Brussels / Belgium.

Development in Web Space

Netbeans 6.5.1 provides full support for developing all kinds of components for Web Space. There are plugins for developing Theme’s. (This used to be something that you only could do in Dreamweaver) Also there are several plugs for Portlets, CMS and so on.

Developing Java Portlets

Installing Netbeans together with Web Space is really easy. After installing Netbeans, and loading all plugins, one can add the Web Space server support through the Services tab in Netbeans. Now you’re able to develop and deploy JSR-286 portlets on the fly. Because the Web Space container supports WSRP 2.0, after deploying your portlet you instantly have a WSRP interface. This you can produce and consume in the Web Space admin portlet.

The Portlet 2.0 API can access all permission properties for making custom made permissions inside a portlet. There are some property files that need to be created, and the portlet role definitions need to be mapped with the Web Space role definition inside the liferay-portlet.xml.

Layouts

Layouts are used to devide a portal page in area’s. Making layouts is done with with Liferay pluginSDK. You can download it from the Liferay website. Be sure to have installed Ant 1.7 on your system. Unpack the plugin and edit the build.properties file for pointing to the Web Space environment. The layout is handled with the help of a tpl file. Over here you can do some divs and some more layout code. With Ant you can do a build and deploy with one command.

Themes

Themes are created like normal web application projects in Netbeans. Be sure to end the project name with -theme. Right-click project and go to New –> Import/Create new Theme to generate a theme template. Without making changes you can already build and deploy the Theme on Web Space. It will show up in the choices of selecting a Theme. To understand a little bit what happens one can check the source of a more extensive theme. With a good ability creating CSS scripts and graphics, one can create original custom made themes / styles.