Blogs

Hey folks!

 

The new version of Liferay Screens, version 1.2,  includes three of the the most demanded and awaited features coming from Liferay community. See? giving feedback pays off! (:

 

The first and most important one is the  offline support. Yes! This is our killer feature for this release, and we're sure it would be one of the main reasons to adopt Liferay Screens in your projects.

 

It's a direct response to our community: o ne of the most common reasons our customers build native apps is for their users to have access to the right information whenever they need it, wherever they need it... even when there’s no connection around! 

 

So our screenlets can now store the information retrieved from your Liferay Portal and use it when the connection is down. Want to store documents, news, web contents, images, forms or even your own custom entities? Now you can!

 

But there’s more. Liferay Screens is not only able to store the information in read-only mode, it is also capable to store the user's input. That is: if the user types anything in a screenlet (content, form...you name it) and it can't be sent to the portal in that exact moment, it will be stored in the local storage and synchronized when connection is restored.

 

And even more! If the synchronization detects a conflict (that is: the content in the server has been modified since it was downloaded to the device), you has programmer will be able to solve the conflict. Or maybe show some fancy UI to let the user do it.

 

Asset Publisher Configuration

 

If you have already used Liferay to build dynamic websites, you surely know how powerful the Asset Publisher is: it’s the perfect tool to dynamically show content based on very advanced user defined filters. With this new feature in Screens, you can take advantage of the asset publisher's stored configuration and reuse them in your Asset List Screenlet - Yes! You configure an asset publisher in your portal and you can reuse its configuration in your mobile app. 

 

Imagine that in your website you have added an asset publisher that shows web contents that uses the structure “News Article” and then filter by category “Sports” and order by “Publish Date”, adding the “Latest sports articles” display to your mobile app is now a blaze!

 

Support for multiple templates for web content

 

You probably have a lot of web content (structured or not) in your portal, and also lots of templates to display your content in many different ways in your Liferay websites. But probably your templates aren't responsive enough to be used in a native mobile app via the Web Content Display Screenlet, making your content look off for you mobile users.... sad, isn’t it? No worries! Multiple template support to the rescue! Starting on this version you can create awesome mobile optimized templates in your Liferay Portal and then display your content with those templates in your mobile apps. Yes, you are totally right... we are talking about iPhone, iPad, Android optimized templates!

 

So, even though it looks like a minor version (just modify the second number! that's too bad!), don't fool yourself: this version sets the foundation for the next generation of screenlets.

 

Get started with Liferay Screens now!