Want to harness all the power that Liferay Portal offers from your mobile apps? Thanks to Liferay’s Mobile SDK, you can do just that. The Liferay Mobile SDK provides a way to streamline consuming Liferay core web services, Liferay utilities, and custom portlet web services. It’s a low-level layer that wraps Liferay JSON web services, making them easy to call in native mobile apps. It takes care of authentication, makes HTTP requests (synchronously or asynchronously), parses JSON results, and handles server-side exceptions so you can concentrate on using the services in your app. The Liferay Mobile SDK bridges the gap between your native app and Liferay services. The official project page gives you access to the SDK releases, provides the latest SDK news, and has forums for you to engage in mobile app development discussions. The Liferay Mobile SDK is available as separate downloads for Android and iOS, and is compatible with Liferay Portal 6.2 and later.
Figure 1: Liferay's Mobile SDK enables your native app to communicate with Liferay.
There are two different types of Mobile SDKs that you need to add to your app’s project, depending on the remote services you need to call. Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK includes the classes required to construct remote service calls in general. It also contains the classes required to call the specific remote services of Liferay’s core portlets. Core portlets are included with every Liferay installation (these are also referred to as out-of-the-box or built-in portlets). However, you need to build an additional Mobile SDK if you want to leverage your custom portlet’s remote services. Once built, this Mobile SDK contains only the classes required to call those services. Therefore, you must install it in your app alongside Liferay’s prebuilt Mobile SDK to leverage your custom portlet’s remote services.
Note that Liferay also provides Liferay Screens for constructing mobile apps that connect to Liferay. Screens uses components called Screenlets to leverage and abstract the Mobile SDK’s low-level service calls. However, if there’s not a screenlet for your use case, or you need more control over the service call, then you may want to use the Mobile SDK directly. You should read the Screens tutorials in addition to the Mobile SDK tutorials here to decide which better fits your needs.
This section’s tutorials cover using the Mobile SDK in Android and iOS app development. The following tutorials introduce these topics and are followed by in-depth tutorials on each:
In addition, the following tutorial covers building Mobile SDKs to support your custom portlet services:
Fasten your seatbelt–it’s time to go mobile with Liferay’s Mobile SDK!
Related Topics:
Creating Android Apps that Use Liferay
Creating iOS Apps that Use Liferay