Developing Applications with Liferay Developer Studio

To develop an application, you need a developer environment. Liferay provides a great environment with Liferay Developer Studio.

Let’s get your Liferay development environment installed.

1. Download and install the Java 7 JDK. Liferay runs on Java, so you need to install it before everything else.

2. Download Liferay Developer Studio. Installing it is easy: unzip it to a convenient location on your system.

3. Launch Developer studio by running the DeveloperStudio executable.

4. The First Start wizard appears next. This leads you through the process of getting your Liferay Portal runtime installed. The fastest way to do this is with the defaults: leave Configure Liferay Portal EE bundled with the Studio installation checked and click Next.

5. Browse to select your activation key provided by Liferay and click Next.

6. Though Liferay Portal ships with an embedded database, as a developer, you’ll want to use a database you can query with your own tools. For this reason, the next page lets you connect the Liferay runtime to any database Liferay supports. Create the database in your DBMS of choice before completing this step. Note that after the wizard completes, you may need to copy your database’s JDBC driver into the lib/ext folder of the Liferay bundle that ships with Developer Studio. When finished, click Next.

   

   Figure 1: The First Start wizard makes it easy to configure the runtime that ships with Liferay Developer Studio.

7. Next, you can connect Studio to Liferay’s Javadocs and source, for code lookups and to help debugging. Browse to the Javadocs or paste in the URL to where they’re stored online (pictured). For source, you can point to a downloaded .zip of the source code or a version checked out from a code repository. Click Finish.

Figure 2: Pointing Studio to the Javadocs and Liferay source can help with debugging your code.

After this, the wizard completes, and you have a fully configured development environment, ready to begin work!

If you don’t have a Liferay enterprise edition activation key or if you want to use an existing installation of Eclipse, continue with the next tutorial on developing apps with Liferay IDE. You can otherwise start Writing Your First Liferay Application.