If you’ve been writing software for a while, you probably have a set of tools that you regularly use. This set of tools has been carefully collected over the years, and every tool is there for one reason: to contribute to your productivity.
Many of us at Liferay are like that, which is why our SDKs are designed to work with any text editor or IDE. You can be productive on the Liferay platform using any tool you want. To jumpstart your efforts, however, we also provide an IDE environment fully integrated with Eclipse. We’ve designed this carefully, so that it integrates well with our existing SDKs, Maven, and other tools that are out there. Liferay IDE helps you manage many features of Liferay’s platform, making them easier to use. There are editors for Service Builder files, workflow definitions, layout templates, and more. You’ll find wizards for creating every kind of Liferay project there is, snippets for tag libraries, and auto-deploy of changes to plugins.
Whether you’ve been using Liferay for a long time or are just getting started, it’s worth your time to check out Liferay IDE and see whether it’s another of those tools you can add to your toolbox. We think you’ll be glad you did.
In this chapter we’ll cover the following topics:
- Installation
- Setting Up Liferay IDE
- Testing/Launching Liferay Tomcat Server
- Creating New Liferay Projects
- Deploying Liferay Projects
- Importing Existing Projects into Liferay IDE
- Using Liferay IDE’s Remote Server Adapter
- Designing workflows with Kaleo Designer for Java
To install and set up Liferay IDE, follow the instructions below. If you’re using Liferay Developer Studio (which comes with Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition), skip to the section titled Testing/Launching Liferay Tomcat Server–Liferay IDE is already configured in Developer Studio.