I had the privilege to attend the Liferay Symposium in Frankfurt for the second time now. The symposium was very nicely organized, I guess mostly thanks to Laila Brown from Liferay for putting all the bits and pieces together for a very enjoyable conference.
From my point of view it was also extremely nice to see many projects using Vaadin being in production. There were all kinds of applications from big ERP system to simple portlets and mobile web applications. I hope we can see them listed later in our project gallery.
Noticed that most of the applications still run on Liferay 5 at this point. The version 6 is on its way to, but I fully understand the argument it might be too fresh updates. For production applications it is wise to be a bit slow on updates, but for the new projects it looks like the best choice already.
Vaadin, Liferay 6 and Liferay IDE
Anyway, my topic was the Vaadin development on Liferay 6. As some of you might remember I promised last year that next version of Liferay will include Vaadin by default. And now it does. We maintain the version included in Liferay trunk and provide the latest version there and you can start a fresh Vaadin project on a fresh Liferay 6 installation right away.
At the same time Liferay has been working with the Liferay IDE. It is an all-in-one Eclipse plugin that manages your portlet plugin projects for Liferay. Among other things it makes Vaadin portlets a few steps easier again.
I wrote short instructions about all this. See the updated instructions in the wiki for the latest tool setup.
Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay
There is also a new tool for all Vaadin users deploying to Liferay. The Vaadin Control Panel is a portlet that helps you to manage the portal-wide widgetset. This has become more important now when there are so many new widgets and add-ons in the Vaadin Directory that you want to use in the Liferay too.
You can download the control panel from the Directory too: http://vaadin.com/addon/vaadin-control-panel-for-liferay
This is first version of the tool and we want to be sure that we are heading to the right direction with this.There probably are some aspects that we haven't considered yet (especially in the large clustered Liferay systems) And we would be more than happy to get some early feedback to push this tool to the right direction. Let's continue the discusstion at our forums.
The Future
While we support all portals via the portal 2.0 spec, Liferay 6 is currently the only portal that integrates Vaadin out-of-the-box. Like Liferay, we are an open source company and share much of the same ideology and we want to see open-source enterprise software being developed with the best tools on the market.
We are still trying to make things better and enhance the Liferay integration both in the core framework but also at the tooling level.
We already created a wizard for Vaadin application to be integrated into the Liferay IDE. The roadmap states that version 1.5 of the Liferay IDE is here before the end of the year, but probably there will be 1.2 even before that where you can try the new wizards.
Also we will include new features into the Vaadin Control Panel - most importantly the update system for Vaadin library itself.
Stay tuned...