If you’re just getting started with Liferay development, Liferay’s learning paths are for you. We start at the beginning: installing a Liferay development environment. Though you can use anything from a text editor and the command line to any Java IDE that’s out there, Liferay provides two development tools that make it easier to write code on Liferay’s platform.
Liferay IDE and Liferay Developer Studio are nearly identical development environments designed for creating Liferay projects. Both are based on Eclipse, a widely used open source IDE.
If you’re a Liferay Enterprise Edition subscriber or interested in Liferay’s premier development environment, begin with Developing Applications with Liferay Developer Studio.
If you want to use Liferay’s free development environment or want to leverage it on top of an existing Eclipse installation, skip over to Developing Applications with Liferay IDE.
Note: To follow Liferay’s learning paths, you must have a Liferay Portal 6.2 instance installed. You must also have the Java 7 JDK installed.