A popular way to develop Liferay applications is to use the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. If you’re a battle-tested developer, you’re likely familiar with MVC. To make things simpler, Liferay has developed its own MVC framework. You might now be thinking, “Simpler? How does yet another MVC implementation make things simpler? I’m tired of redundant frameworks!” Liferay’s MVC framework, however, provides many time-saving benefits that streamline Liferay development. Unlike many Java MVC implementations, it’s a lightweight framework. It also hides part of the complexity of portlets and makes common operations easier. What’s more, Liferay’s own developers use it to develop portlets. This means there are many robust examples to reference when you need to design or troubleshoot your applications. Liferay also provides tooling that makes creating Liferay MVC applications a snap. You’ll quickly find that learning and using Liferay MVC saves you time over trying to implement your application with a different MVC implementation.
Here, you’ll use Liferay MVC to develop a Liferay portlet from start to finish. This includes installing Liferay’s development tools, generating your persistence layer, integrating with Liferay features like search and indexing, generating remote services, and much more.