If you've been developing plugins for the Liferay Marketplace, you're undoubtedly aware of the issues surrounding the development and publication process for apps. The main issues are around the required use of the Security Manager (aka PACL), which has proven challenging to get right (or not even possible to make work, depending on the nature of the app, and the use of certain frameworks/libraries). This, plus other issues in the most recent release (such as LPS-29103) has meant that many of our most valued community members have been prevented from publishing to the Marketplace through no fault of their own, and they have not been shy about letting us know of their concerns (see here, and here). I personally find it very encouraging to see such passion and constructive criticism from our community, and I'm happy to report that we're making significant changes to the Marketplace to address these concerns and make Marketplace the high quality, go-to place for Liferay apps.
Here's what the team is working on right now:
- Remove the requirement for Security Manager (aka PACL) to be enabled
- Improve the "Denial Reasons" given when apps are rejected (usually because they fail a test case)
- Document the environments in which apps are tested and more clearly specify requirements for metadata
- Improve the Security Manager developer experience
The first item in particular is intended to bring back the kind of functionality we had in the legacy community plugins repository, but still ensure that the Marketplace contains quality apps that actually work as advertised (since apps will still be run through anti-virus checks and basic smoke tests). App developers will have a choice to publish their app with or without the use of PACL, and apps will be marked as such when viewed on the Marketplace. This will also make it less ambiguous for developers looking to enter the
Marketplace App Contest with apps that otherwise work without PACL. PACL will still be required for apps offered for sale (once that feature is available).
The other items relate to improving the developer experience of developing for Marketplace. We now have hundreds of apps and registered developers (not including Liferay itself) who are publishing to the Marketplace, and it's critical that the development and publishing process be as smooth, intuitive, and informative as possible. This is foremost on the team's mind, and if you have any additional feedback (besides those mentioned above), don't hesitate to make yourself heard either in the comments below, or in the
Marketplace Developer forums.
We are hoping to implement these changes in the next couple of months, to resolve the difficulties with Marketplace development.
As far as the PACL experience, in the next Liferay releases (for both 6.1 and 6.2) will be a new PACL policy generator tool (
LPS-32200) which will vastly simplify the creation of a PACL-enabled app. If you want to test-drive it now, go grab the
6.2 Milestone 5 build - it's fully implemented and ready for you to try out (
here's how).
Finally, I want to let you know that we (as a company) make
every effort to listen and respond to the open source community. We don't always get everything perfect right out of the gate, and sometimes it takes a while to make a change, but please know that Liferay depends on its community to point out the good and the bad, and make corrections as necessary. This is another example of why open source and open development processes are vastly superior to the alternative.
