Hello all, I apologize it has taken so long to release a new version of Liferay IDE that supports Liferay 7 development.  But today we are pleased to announce the first milestone release for Liferay IDE 3.0.  And to quote a famous first line of a movie recently released:  "This will begin to make things right."

For Eclipse Luna (4.4) and Mars (4.5), you can install from following updatesite URL:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/milestone/

If you are interested in downloading a Mars.1 + Liferay IDE bundle you can find those on the Liferay IDE downloads page. 

New Features in Liferay IDE 3.0 M1

Liferay 7 Server Support

Now you can setup and run/debug Liferay 7 servers.  Note that this supports all Liferay 7.x bundles, including non-tomcat bundles.

Also the server publishing of modules has been improved to directly publish bundles to the module framework in Liferay portal since webapp deployment is no longer supported going forward, all modules (even wars) will be installed via the module framework.  During development if you have deployed any modules, any changes you make to the bundle, on save of the file, the bundle will be immediately rebuilt and reinstalled into the running Liferay 7 module framework.

Once you have launched Liferay 7 server, and you want to interact with OSGi runtime you can do that with the new Gogo shell integration.

Liferay 7 Module Dev Support

In Liferay 7 the new method of extending / customizing Liferay is through modules (OSGi bundles).  So in Liferay IDE we have added support for developing these modules through New Project wizards, recognizing both gradle and maven based module projects, and deploying these modules to Liferay 7.

New Liferay Module Project Wizard

In this wizard you can create new individual module projects based on different templates.  For 3.0 M1 only "gradle" type of modules can be created.  We are working on maven versions that should be ready 3.0 GA.

The 2nd page of the wizard gives you ability to customize the Java class that will be the DS Component class.

If you choose "service" as the module template then on this page you can specify which "service" you are trying to implement.  This is useful for implementing on of the many OSGi integration points for extending Liferay 7 UI.

Gradle / Maven bundle projects

We have included Gradle support through Eclipse Buildship plugin that is bundled with Liferay IDE.  Maven bundle project support is via the Eclipse m2e plugin (also available as a Liferay IDE feature).  

For a bundle project that uses gradle, you can import it with the File > Import > Gradle project.  Any gradle project that applies either the Liferay gradle plugin or bnd builder gradle plugin will be recognized as a "Liferay 7 module".

Maven projects that use either "maven-bundle-plugin" or "bnd-maven-plugin" are recognized as "Liferay 7 module" projects.  

Any project that is a "Liferay 7 bundle" can be published (deployed) to Liferay 7 server in the servers view.  And for each resource in the bundle that is modified in the IDE, the bundle will immediately be rebuilt and reinstalled into Liferay 7 module framework.

Future Blog posts

There are many new development tools related to Liferay IDE and Liferay 7 that I would like to show you but I want to split that out into a few other blog posts, call it a series... :)

• Liferay IDE and "Workspaces"
• Introducing blade cli tool
• Legacy plugin sdks projects in Liferay IDE 3
• Migration tools for Liferay 6.2 projects

As always find us on the forums if you have questions or suggestions or bugs (warning this is milestone there are going to be some!)