Liferay Faces Roadmap for Liferay Portal 7.2 Support (2019)

For Liferay 7.2 support we have three major goals:

1. Support deployment of thin JSF WARs.

Liferay Faces has always required that developers embed the JSF implementation (Mojarra), all Liferay Faces JARs, and (optionally) CDI inside their WAR’s WEB-INF/lib folder. However, in Liferay 7.2 CDI dependencies will be deployed as OSGi modules.1 The Liferay Faces JARs (and Mojarra and PrimeFaces) will also support deployment as OSGi modules.2 So CDI, Mojarra, and Liferay Faces (and PrimeFaces) will not need to be embedded in your WARs anymore.

2. Improve CDI alignment in archetypes, demos, and documentation.

JSF and JavaEE/JakartaEE have become more and more reliant on CDI since it’s inception. As of the release of JSF 2.3, the non-CDI JSF @ManagedBean facilities have been deprecated to encourage developers to fully rely on CDI for dependency injection in JSF. So our archetypes, demos, and documentation will use CDI by default in order to ensure compatibility with future versions of JSF.3

3. Support Portlet 3.0.

The Liferay Faces team plans on releasing Liferay Faces Bridge API and Bridge Impl 5.0.0 as the reference implementation for JSR 378: Portlet 3.0 Bridge for JavaServer (TM) Faces 2.2. This release is subject to JCP approval, so follow @FacesBridgeSpec for news about its progress.4

Since this new version of Liferay Faces will be released a few months after the Liferay 7.2 release, we will ensure that the current release of Liferay Faces works as a legacy option for Liferay 7.2 by releasing a minor bugfix version of Liferay Faces Bridge Ext 5.0.4 (and possibly Bridge Impl 4.1.3 and Portal 3.0.4) if necessary. These versions should be available at the release of Liferay 7.2 in late Q2 or early Q3.

Our ultimate goal is to release the following Liferay Faces JARs to support thin JSF WARs, Portlet 3.0, and CDI: