LiferayPhotos: a fully functional app in 10 days using Liferay Screens. Part 1 Introduction 

Before we begin with this story, for those of you that don’t know about Liferay Screens. Liferay Screens is a library for iOS, Android and Xamarin that aims to speed up the development of native applications that use Liferay as a backend. It’s basically a collection of components, called Screenlets. These components are very easy to connect to your Liferay instance and provide plenty of features.

This is going to be a series of 3 blog post describing the creation of an iOS application: LiferayPhotos. We are going to describe how we did it from beginning to end and what are the advantages of using Liferay Screens in your projects. All within a 10-day timeframe.

This first blog post will cover the first aspects of the application, from the initial idea to the mockups of how the application should be.

Idea

The application that we want to build is inspired by a well-known app: Instagram. We want to build an application where a user can:

  • Log in.

  • Sign up.

  • Upload pictures, and add stickers too!

  • See other people’s uploaded pictures.

  • Comment pictures.

  • Like pictures.

  • Be able to chat with other users.

  • See your profile with your uploaded pictures.

With all of this in mind, let's move on to the decision of using Liferay Screens to develop this application.

Why use Liferay Screens?

As you have read in the title, we are going to build this app in only 10 days, yes you have read it right. This is one of the greatest benefits of using Liferay Screens, it makes the development of apps really fast. But… how is this even possible? As I mentioned earlier, the library contains a set of ready-to-use components to cover most of our use cases.

Are you tired of implementing a login screen over and over again? By just using a Login Screenlet, adding a couple of line of code, and configuring it with your Liferay parameters, it’s done! You now have a working login screen in your application.

Okay, this seems promising, but what if the UI doesn’t fit your brand style? No problem whatsoever, the screenlets are designed to support this scenario, UI and business logic are decoupled so you can change it easily without having to rewrite the logic.

Last thing you might ask, what if the use case I want it’s not supported by the available screenlets? This is not a problem either, within Liferay Screens there is also a toolkit to build your own screenlets and reuse them in your projects.

Prototyping

Before working on the app, we have to visualize the application wireframe to split and schedule the task involved. We have created a basic prototype of the different screens of the application:


Conclusion

As you can see here, there are a lot of advantages to using Liferay Screens in your developments. But this is not all… in the next two posts, we will be unveiling other interesting parts of the project and its lifecycle.

Check out the next post of the series