iPROFS Technology Blog

Liferay just released their second service pack for 6.0 enterprise customers. Apart from lost of small bug fixes, they included one welcome enhancement to the hooks system: overriding struts actions in a hook

Before SP2 we tried to move our custom code into hooks, which have the following structure:

my-code-hook:
- custom-jsps // Override for default Liferay JSP's
- portlets // New portlets
- java // New java code


Changed or added struts actions had to go in liferay-ext. Most of the time you’d want a struts action to call your java code inside your hook. However because the hook and liferay-ext live in different WAR-files you run into class loader problems.

Before SP2 we solved this by putting the shared java code in liferay-service-ext, which gets deployed into the tomcat lib directory and is therefore shared by all class loaders.
This will mean our code gets spread into 3 places:

• liferay-ext: the struts actions
• liferay-service-ext: shared java code
• my-hook: all other code

Liferay 6.0 EE SP2 allows us to move the struts actions into the hook, freeing both liferay-ext and liferay-service-ext of unnecessary code and both cleaning and simplifying our build structure a lot.

The community edition of Liferay will have to wait until Liferay 6.1 is out later this year.