The Extlet Plugin for the Liferay Portal is now open source

The Extlet plugin brings the power of Liferay Ext Development environment and flexibility & simplicity of a plugin architecture. It is more modular than the upcoming official Ext plugin and it's designed to work with the Liferay 5.2.3.

Features:

• Almost as powerful as the EXT Environment
• Modular - multiple Extlet plugins in one Liferay instance (including config files)
• Applications build on the top of Extlet are installable as easy as regular WAR plugins and might contain Liferay customizations, hooks and portlets
• Works with the Liferay 5.2.3 on the Tomcat, support for the Glassfish and migration to the Liferay 6 is in progress
• Developed and maintaned by IBA CZ
• Released under MIT licence

Liferay 6 Preview introduced the Ext plugin, which is supposed to replace the old EXT environment. The Extlet Plugin is more powerful but aims to stay as much compatible as possible.

What is Extlet?

Extlet is a development and runtime environment for the Liferay portal v. 5.2.3 on Tomcat.
Extlet is aimed to replace the Extension Environment.
Extlet licence correlates with the Liferay Licence (MIT for Liferay 5).

Why Extlet?

The Liferay’s Extension Environment is slow, huge and monolithic.
Extlet is modular, smaller and quicker.
Ext plugin should be the next step, but for now is not so modular as it could be.

For additional info see the Extlet GitHub home and the Extlet vs. EXT (plugin) comparison.

Why does this matter? I don't understand what the EXT plugin is, or what makes Extlet better, or why I care. I'm entirely lacking context.

That's probably okay, but... gosh, if I'm supposed to be interested, I want to be interested. But I don't have enough information to tell me if the enthusiasm in the post is justified.

I'm left thinking: "What?"

Hello Joseph,

thanks for your replay. 

If you want to be interested (that's great!), here is a background:

1. Look at the Liferay.com. In short - it is IMHO the best OS Java portal targeting also a CMS market
2. If you feel still interested, try to download zip with the portal (last stable version is 5.2.3) and try to play with it, it's quite cute ;)

If you want to develop for the portal, I know someone use the portal as a development platform, not just simple CMS. Thus Liferay offers some tools for development. Plugins SDK and Extension Environment. All are based on the Ant (for version 5.2.3, for v. 6 there is also maven 2 supported).

1. Using Plugins SDK you can create new portlets, themes, layouts, change a bit the portal behavior using Hooks
2. Using Extension Environment you can completely override the Liferay portal

Now, the Extlet is just a development tool replacing the Extension Environment. It is simpler, lighter, you can use maven.

In the new portal's version 6 there is no more the Extension Environment. It is replaced by the Ext plugin (located in the Plugins SDK) which is based on the Extlet. The history is Ext. Environment -> Extlet -> Ext plugin. I just wanted to free the Extlet for Liferay's community to be able to use it and a bit more to understand.

-- tom

From one of the software architects (Raymond Auge) this way is totally discarded https://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/4341570#_19_message_342406 .

In fact, in AS like Websphere, this way of class overriding doesn't work as intended sometimes. The way to do this is using struts-config or ext-spring.xml files, configuring new implementations overriding action paths or bean definitions.

Hi Samuel,

I agree with Raymond, although it was 3 years ago.

To be clear, that's neither EXT environment  bad practices nor Extlet's. It's about your implementation approach.

1, For someone it could be like a magic. For those who understand it is simple. Extlet is primarily for Tomcat, it's written everywhere. The ClassLoader mechanism is there obvious. And for example JBoss or Glassfish use Tomcat as it's servlet container too.

2, Override original classes is not the preffered way of implementation. Extlet's big advantage is merging config files, so as you can have multiple struts-config or spring-ext files.

-- tom

Aukcell is a recognized expert in all aspects of Liferay deployment. There are lots of details that you need to setup correctly in order to make Liferay work your way. We know them all. Business case? Architecture? Theme? Custom portlets? Performance tuning? Migration from other portals? We have done that. And much more. www#aukcell#com

If you are looking for any help on Liferay portal support and custom development,pls feel free to contact  cherry#aukcell.com   or  Skype : aukcell       AIM: eonpeter        MSN :eonpeter at gmail dot com