What is the 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).
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.
Extlet was created by IBA CZ, s. r. o., which continues to support it.
It has been migrated from the IBA CZ internal environment, where the versions 1.0 to 1.3 were created, to the GitHub, where it’s living now.
Extlet was developed in August 2009 in the IBA CZ. It was presented on the Liferay European Symposium to Brian Chan. Brian, inspired by the idea, created the Ext Plugin. The current version 1.3 works the Liferay 5.2.3 and Tomcat 6. We hope that Ext plugin will replace Extlets in the future. Until that day we are going to support the Extlets.
Please refer to the How The Extlet Works.
Note: The EXTlet means lightweight EXT. Deployable like a portlet, working like the EXT.
Extlet is based on these main ideas:
- Reusable components in terms of portlets are very limited, most of the components need the EXT or are completely written in the EXT.
One of our project managers told me that developers were confused because architecture documents described components as one logical package. In fact, they needed to implement the functionality in portlets, hook, sometimes theme and the rest is in the EXT. It was obvious that all functionality should be in one physical war file, that can be un/deployed at once, upgraded, verified that it was deployed in the version x.×.x, etc.
- We (IBA CZ) want to build reusable components using Maven and install them into our internal Nexus repository.
Ant is good, we choose Maven because it’s simpler for simple use.
- The EXT is big, heavy, slow and monolithic.
We want to have something smaller, lighter, quicker and modularizable
Next: All-in-one Concept