Liferay DXP is tool agnostic–you can use whatever tools you like to develop on it. You can use any IDE and even use Gradle, Bnd, or BndTools if you don’t want to use Workspace. The drawback is you lose the Liferay-specific project templates that you get with Blade and Workspace.
Blade lets you create modules to develop anywhere, not only in Liferay Workspace.
Here are some new Gradle features Liferay provides that are independent of Workspace:
- Liferay’s Gradle plugins
- Buildship plugins in Liferay Dev Studio DXP
- Liferay Dev Studio DXP’s new Gradle views for developing modules and working with Gradle tasks
Liferay has worked hard to make Liferay DXP IDE-agnostic. There are Liferay module developers who use IntelliJ and some enjoy using NetBeans.
Finally, you can copy and modify Liferay sample projects to serve as templates in place of the Blade templates. They’re available for these build systems:
- Gradle
- Liferay Workspace
- Maven
Liferay’s approach to tooling has vastly improved for Liferay DXP 7.1. Our tools help you upgrade to Liferay DXP 7.1, continue developing traditional plugins the way you have been, and migrate to optimal development environments. Liferay Workspace and the improved Maven support facilitate module development. And developing on Liferay DXP using other tools is easier than ever. Your tool options are wide open.