Gurgen Grigoryan:
Hello everyone,I'm trying to figure out how to update the freemarker version liferay is using, so we can take advantage of some of the updated built-ins.
We are currently on Liferay 7.0.6 GA7, with Freemarker 2.3.23 and we would like to update just the freemarker version to 2.3.3.
In my world, 2.3.23 -> 2.3.3 is called a downgrade (to a version from 2005) - did you mean .30?
Liferay 7.3.4 GA5 comes with Freemarker 2.3.29, which might be close enough to being current.
Of course it's not documented how to exchange one library (that the whole system is tested with) with another one (which nobody ever tested). That's especially true for software that has initially been published in 2016 (Liferay Portal CE 7.0.0 GA1) and a library that's published in 2020 (Freemarker 2.3.30).
I'd
not even try a plain replacement of the library, but rather upgrade the whole platform. Not because of new template built-ins, but because of the probability to receive security updates for a platform that's running server-side. Instead of working on some minor feature upgrade on a tiny part of a platform that you rely on (and make future upgrades fail, if the upgrade process stumbles upon code that it doesn't know), invest the time in an upgrade of the platform. You're already on an OSGi based version, from there on it's relatively simple if you followed the best practices (e.g. minimize changes to the underlying implementation. Incidentally that's exactly what you ask for here)
In summary:
- Spend time on upgrading to the latest version = well invested time, improves maintainability, adds many features.
- Spend time in customizing the underlying platform's implementation = Raise the burden for future upgrades, decrease maintainability, add one minor feature at a time.
