Appendix A. Liferay and IDEs

 

Although there are developers today who prefer nothing more than a command-line interface to a build tool such as Ant coupled with a good text editor, they aren’t me, even though I hope someday to aspire to such guru-ship. It can be argued that most developers use an integrated development environment (IDE) to produce code. IDEs offer several benefits over a command-line interface and text editor:

  • Code lookup and completion
  • Project and file browsing
  • Refactoring support
  • Integrated debugging
  • Integrated interface to source code management (SCM) software, complete with diff tools
  • Quick, built-in interface to Javadoc and inline documentation
  • Depending on the IDE, more—sometimes much more

From the information in chapter 2, it should be easy to see how to use Liferay’s SDKs with just a text editor and a command-line interface to Ant. Because many if not most developers today use an IDE, it’s important to spend some time covering how you set up Plugins SDK projects in an IDE, but the topic isn’t necessarily germane to Liferay specifically. This information is useful, but didn’t fit well into the book itself, so it appears here. I’ll demonstrate how to work with Liferay using the two most popular open source IDEs available at the time of this writing: Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) and NetBeans (www.netbeans.org), as well as with Liferay’s flavor of Eclipse, Liferay IDE/Developer Studio.

A.1. Eclipse

A.2. Using Liferay IDE and Liferay Developer Studio

A.3. Using NetBeans as a development environment