So far, you have a prototype application that uses Liferay’s Model-View-Controller (MVC) portlet framework. MVC is a great design pattern for web applications because it splits your application into three parts (the model, the view, and the controller). This lets you swap out those parts if necessary.
A persistence layer and a service layer are added to these three parts of your application. To get the prototype working, you used Portlet Properties to create a rudimentary persistence layer. Since this isn’t a long-term solution, you’ll now replace that layer by persisting your guestbooks and their entries to a database.
Figure 1: Service Builder generates the shaded layers of your application.
Service Builder is Liferay’s code generation tool for defining object models and mapping those models to SQL databases. By defining your model in a single XML file, you can generate your object model (the M in MVC), your service layer, and your persistence layer all in one shot. At the same time, you can generate web services (more on that later) and support every database Liferay DXP supports.
Ready to begin?