ShouId I migrate from Liferay 6.1 to Liferay 6.2? - liferay

I would like to ask a question about wether or not I should do the migration to Liferay 6.2.
Me and my team are working since 4 month on a portal quite big developed with Liferay 6.1 (CE edition) and now, since the project publication date is still 4-5 month ahead (so I do have time), I was wondering if doing the migration to 6.2 now is a good choice.
I already tried the new version and I must say I am impressed about the new features and since now I haven't find any bugs.
Anyone had any experience on developing portlet/themes on Liferay 6.2? Is is worth it to do the migration now or shall I wait for the next ga2 release?
Any suggestion is very welcome.
Thanks

Depends mostly on the kind of work you've done on that portal. Even slight upgrades in Liferay, can have major differences in the source code. If this affects the work you've done, it will affect the upgrade too. For example, things will get difficult to update if :
You have developed custom portlets, as they will need recompilation for the new runtime
Developed Portlets that use ServiceBuilder might need more work than just a recompilation
Using Hooks (even simple jsp hooks) might need re-writing. ext hooks will almost certainly need to, and it can become a major pain
On, the other hand, if most of your work had to do with light theming and content management, it could become an relatively easy and painless upgrade.
In any case, make sure to keep a backup of your Liferay Database, because once you upgrade, there is no way to downgrade back to the initial version.

As you're using CE, my recommendation is to upgrade as soon as possible. Reason is that there are no more updates for 6.1, now that 6.2 is out. If you're going live in 5 months, you'd be on a version that's unsupported for half a year at the date of publication.
The alternative is to go to EE, which is supported for ~5 years from release, e.g. you'll have several years of support in front of you. However, as Liferay is paying my salary, note that I might be biased...
Of course, being unsupported "by Liferay" does not mean that you won't be able to fix any bugs or issues, but you'll have to do this on your own, and sooner or later you should upgrade anyway... If you're not yet live, I'm recommending to do it sooner.

Liferay 6.2 does not (yet) support as many marketplace apps as Liferay 6.1. Also Liferay 6.2 CE has bugs, and patches are available only to EE subscribers; this forced us to use Liferay 6.1 CE instead of 6.2 CE.

You will have issues if you are using the Vaadin framework under Liferay.
Liferay 6.2 CE does not support Vaadin out of the box ... it is delivered with Vaadin 6.8, but it is broken - your portlet code will break.
You would have to consider moving to Vaadin 7.1 at best ... and that is a non-trivial code migration as many items have been deprecated between 6.8 and 7.
I went that route and the learning curve was unexpectedly steep.

Related

SAP: Upgrading Hybris from version 5.1.1 to 6.2

We have SAP Hybris Commerce version 5.1.1 with custom extensions installed. Now we need to upgrade it to newest version 6.2.
My question is: Can we upgrade it to 6.2 and skip all versions between 5.1 and 6.2? Or must it be done by upgrading to 5.2, then to 5.3 and so on?
Yep - 5.1.1 to 6.2 ought to work (I've been working on a project that's done exactly this).
You will probably have to make some changes - watch out for any customisations you've made - it might be worth reading through the release docs to have an idea of what's changed - off the top of my head the structure of add ons is one area that's a bit different between 5.1 and 6.2, but otherwise things should work OK in theory.
Yes you can directly update to 6.2.
It's important to regulary update your hybris version. You should not have so much gap with current version. Indeed it become tougher to migrate your custom code.
Upgrading each minor version in a row is totally useless most of the time. Only do this if you have issues you can't solve while migrating to the target version.
You should take a look at this migration documentation and this guide (it can be used even if it doesn't match your version).
Note that some stuff like promotion are totally different in hybris 6 so you can expect some trouble to migrate everything. Take care of your extensions generated with old template also.
5.5.1 introduces JDK8 and Spring 4, I would not underestimate this change! Depending on the size of your project I would first go for 5.5.1. Also notice the MySQL change for 6.2 (5.6). Don't forget to declare deployment tables in your items.xml. Search for "third-party compatibility" and "release notes" on the wiki. Also try shifting to the backoffice since the hMC is marked as deprecated.
Yes you can migrate directly 6.2.
The time and difficulty depends on your custom code (and how much it respects good practices : naming conventions, usage of service, architecture respect...etc)
You might also consider that HMC is deprecated in 6.2

IBM Domino Designer 9.0.1 Development

I have just upgraded myself to new version and started development in 9.0.1 Revision 20131022.0932 ( release 9.0.1). I have couple of small queries.
1) Am I using the right version for development or need to upgrade by implementing patches etc?. This is stable for development?
2) Previously I was developing applications on 8.5.2 but my clients were on 8.5.x and 9.x.
This migration is safe for existing applications? no crashes? no code mismatch? Is their any guideline for developer? Co-Existence of clients is possible?
Please guide me and thanks in advance
Best Regards,
Qaiser
In general, upgrading to the latest Designer version is ideal, especially with (as Per recommends) the latest fix packs, as well as on the server.
For non-XPage design elements, there should be no incompatibilities with 8.5.x through 9.0.1, so you're good there.
If you do XPages intended to be rendered by older versions (either older servers or XPiNC in older clients), you could run into trouble there, using properties and controls that don't exist there. You can mitigate that a bit by going to the app's "Xsp Properties" in Designer and changing the "Minimum Supported Release". That won't help you avoid trouble with third-party plugins not installed everywhere, but it helps with the core runtime controls.

Liferay Portal CE and EE

Our company is developing e-portal solutions for the government in Vietnam. We are using Liferay Community Edition. We are considering switching to Enterprise Edition.
From a programmer's perspective, is there something LP EE can do that LP CE cannot (performance, security, functionality, etc.)? We would like to hear from the experiences of programmers who have worked with both LP CE and EE before.
Thank you so much.
Linh
In addition to what the others already mentioned, Liferay EE is supported for ~5 years after release, while you won't get upgrades for major CE versions once the next release is out - so you need to upgrade less often. Support includes patches for problems that you discover (on a service level) as well as cumulative fixpacks, typically more often than on CE.
For clustering - especially for bigger clusters - there are some additional clustering options in EE that optimize the cluster communication in order to scale better.
Liferay Sync can synchronize multiple document libraries on EE, compared to a single document library in CE
Liferay Developer Studio, the commercial extension of eclipse, works with more application servers - especially the "big iron" servers while the CE/Open Source version Liferay IDE works with the open source appservers/servletcontainers.
Plus, you're supporting further development of the product directly.
That being said, however you decide, please get involved in the Liferay community and help to make the product even better
That is no prommical question, but I can say that EE get early bugfixes and EE is altogether robustly that CE.
Also, Liferay Portal EE has access to EE only marketplace applications, such as:
Kaleo Workflow Designer
Kaleo Workflow Forms
Auditing portlet
Reporting portlet
There may be more EE only applications but that is all I can think of right now.

Subsonic 3.1 when is it likely?

I have a project built around Subsonic 3.0.0.3 and have run into the dreaded medium trust issue, can anyone tell me is there a way I can mod the code myself to get this working or what the expected timescale for 3.1 version is? Its looking increasingly like I will have to ditch subsonic to get my system running
Regards
Mike
No timeframe for SubSonic 3.1 (or 3.0.0.4), but here are the current plans: http://groups.google.com/group/subsonicproject/browse_thread/thread/caae09418ce4d975/
The SubSonic Google discussion group is the best place to find out about the current development happenings for SubSonic.
Short answer, as soon as possible.
Long answer, there's a number of things planned for 3.1 these include (but are not necessarily limited to):
Oracle support
MediumTrust support
Automatic mapping of collections in SimpleRepository
These are all in development right now but before they become the main focus we need to get version 3.0.0.4 out the door with fixes for a lot of the outstanding issues listed on github. There's also a lot of more boring work going on behind the scenes which should make regular and stable releases easier.
The current release schedule is:
Version 3.0.0.4 - 22nd March 2010
Version 3.1 - 22nd May 2010

Does Liferay require the Jikes compiler?

All Liferay docs seem to suggest that it is necessary to install the Jikes compiler in addition to the JDK. Is this really needed, to do Liferay portlet dev, or can I just suffice with the JDK.
No. As far as I know Jikes was never a strong dependency. It used to be a default compiler for older releases of Liferay. But since version 4.4 they changed to standard javac.
No. We have Liferay 5.2.3 running in a production environment. We've done a few customizations of the liferay core as well as new portlets.
I never installed the Jikes compiler, the JDK was sufficient for every task.
The last two years at least, we've been predominantly building with ecj, which is much, much faster than any JDK compiler I've ever used.
In your build.${user.name}.properties specify
javac.compiler=org.eclipse.jdt.core.JDTCompilerAdapter

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