Blogs

Another quick one today... So when you start your brand spanking new Liferay environment, you will automatically get your test@liferay.com administrator account (or test@<your company email here> if you've set up the company.default.web.id and/or company.default.virtual.host.mail.domain property keys before first launch, or <your admin>@<your company...

Introduction Recently there have been a bunch of questions lately in Slack, in Ask, and even in Liferay Support tickets complaining about the time it takes to log into Liferay and what can be done to improve performance, specifically targeting the hash algorithms... TL;DR - Liferay has increased the rounds on the PBKDF2 hash which is detrimental to your login...

Introduction You may have seen my blog Setting Up JNDI in Liferay 7.4 which I posted to explain how to do a JNDI lookup. The code works, I assure you, but there's one group of developers that blog didn't serve: Spring Portlet Developers. Whether you are developing using PortletMVC4Spring and Spring 5, or you are developing using Spring Portlet MVC under an older ...

Introduction I've been working with a client to upgrade their Spring portlet wars to Liferay 7.4. And the update is kind of big as we're upgrading Spring, changing to PortletMVC4Spring (needed for Spring 5), ... They have a large number of Spring portlet wars, but in reviewing the code I noticed that each of the wars had duplicate Spring services defined into the Spring...

Introduction I've worked with clients that, for one reason or another, needed to change their database platform. This ask has increased with the move to DXPCloud and MySQL database. I'm not sure there's a well defined plan for how to migrate a Liferay database, so I thought I'd blog about it. Now, if you know anything about me, you know I'm a planner and I create (sometimes intricate)...

Introduction I was recently polling my coworkers looking for new blog ideas, and Filipe Melo asked about Websockets. I haven't seen any other documentation or blogs about building Websocket solutions for Liferay, so I figured this would be an interesting challenge. Websockets was introduced to provide a full duplex and realtime client/server communication path between remote clients and your...

Introduction So recently I completed a database upgrade from Liferay EE 6.1 up to Liferay DXP 7.4. It was actually pretty straightforward and I didn't encounter any significant blockers. I did however learn some stuff along the way and I thought I'd share those details here so you will be able to do your next Liferay DB upgrade in the same way. Note that although I'm specifically including...

Introduction So I wrote https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/extending-liferay-osgi-modules five years ago targeting Liferay 7.0. A lot has changed since then. Liferay Gradle Workspace plugin has seen numerous updates. Gradle has seen an update or two as well. Recently when asked to assist a client who wanted to extend Liferay's Journal Article service, I started by recommending they look...

Introduction In a recent blog I explained how to create a React-based portlet within your Liferay Gradle Workspace by using the js-widget Blade template which in turn uses the Yeoman Liferay JS Generator to create the project. (Wow, that was a mouthful ;-) ) In this way, you can have your Liferay Gradle Workspace take care of building your complete suite of Liferay modules, the...

Introduction I posted two blog posts this week, and each of them had a particular drawback - lack of cluster coordination. The first blog post on cluster-enabled upgrade processes introduced using an @Reference dependency upon a specific Release version, the idea being that the component shouldn't start unless that version was available. When the upgrade process would run on the cluster...

I recently was helping a client with an upgrade process and that had run into a little problem... A few of the model hints were not updated on some of the columns in their Service Builder services and, as we all know, Service Builder will not ensure the columns are changed in a production environment (well, actually any environment where the schema.module.build.auto.upgrade property is not set...

IntroductionAs many folks know, I'm known for telling people not to look inside the Liferay database itself. It's not always clear what is what in the DB and Liferay has a lot of code around retrieving and updating data that you likely will not get completely right if you were to update the DB directly.I typically end with "Always, always use the Liferay API for your data needs..."And, if...

So some time ago I wrote the Cluster Details marketplace plugin. Basically you drop this guy into all of your Liferay clusters and you get a nifty little control panel that tells you details about the cluster, all of the nodes which have joined the cluster and it identifies who the leader of the cluster is at the moment:Not super complicated, but it is a handy little tool to identify details...

Introduction One of the great advantages I have being known in the community is really the opportunity to meet, talk and work with talented developers and teams. Recently the team at ACSoftware announced in the Liferay Community Slack they were working on a new Liferay development tool, and I was fortunate enough to work with them on evaluation and testing. As it is just released, I...

Introduction So I get finished which the previous blog, Visiting DynamicQuery, and I shared it with my team. I'm always kind of happy when I get a new blog post done, so I share it with everyone I can think of. The first comment I got was from my friend and teammate, Shane Merriss: Hey Dave, thanks for the blog post, I’ll be able to share it with my client since we use it in a...

Introduction If you've used any Liferay entities or ServiceBuilder custom entities, you've likely run into a situation where you've needed to perform a custom query to get a set of results that are outside of what the normal methods provide. So you've had to use a DynamicQuery in order to make that happen. Or perhaps you've needed to perform batch operations on entities and...

One thing I sometimes see is using a given Liferay feature the wrong way in order to do something. Take delivering content to the right users. Liferay actually has a bunch of ways to accomplish this kind of thing. First we have taxonomy. Using vocabularies, categories and tags, you can apply taxonomy to your assets and then, through an asset publisher or search filter, for...

I did an informal poll on the Liferay community Slack channel recently: I was actually kind of surprised by the majority of votes for the "What is the target platform?" option. So, inspired by the results of the poll, I'm going to answer the question, What is the Target Platform? The Target Platform's Roots So the phrase, "Target Platform", is really a Liferay-only name...

Just a quick post today... So I've been using the Target Platform like all the time now. I don't want to have to worry about versions, especially those Liferay modules that change version numbers on every fix pack... However, I've found that sometimes the version numbers just aren't there. But often I only find this out after I've stripped out the version and tried a build. My...