Liferay Releases SDK to Streamline Custom Mobile App Development
Today, the world renowned open source portal software giants Liferay, Inc., is releasing a mobile software development kit.
Liferay, is a leading provider of enterprise open source portal and collaboration software products, servicing Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Their clients include Allianz, Carrefour, Danone, Rolex, Siemens, Toyota and the United Nations.
Their brand new Mobile SDK is part of their commitment to being a mobile-ready platform, which began with making responsive design work out of the box in Liferay Portal 6.2.
So, let's take a look at what Liferay customers can look forward to.
Bringing You into the Mobile Revolution
Liferay's new Mobile SDK takes the platform’s mobile capabilities a step further, making the unique benefits of Liferay Portal available to mobile app developers. According to Bryan Cheung, Liferay's CEO, it's all about bringing customers into the mobile revolution:
“I’m excited that we’re thinking about how to bring our customers into the mobile revolution—and it really is a revolution, impacting every aspect of the way we do business and behave as a society. I think developers are going to love the Mobile SDK, because people are so hungry for the kind of immediacy that you only get from your smartphone. Anything that helps you make mobile apps more quickly with more relevant functionality is going to add a lot of value.”
The Liferay Mobile SDK has been designed to work seamlessly with Liferay Portal 6.2 along with other major mobile app platforms including iOS and Android.
Among Liferay Mobile SDK's many features include:
- Authentication against your Liferay Portal instance
- Exception handling
- Remote services calls
- JSON parsing
- Batch calls
- Async calls
- Auto-generated SDK, which is template based
- Integration with Developer Studio
- Compatibility with custom portlets
There are three key reasons to use the SDK when building mobile apps. These are:
- Common shared services such as log-in, handling errors, and getting content to and from the mobile app (using JSON)
- Use of Liferay’s built-in content and collaboration features in the mobile app
- Use of custom objects or integrations in the mobile app
For example, a company whose CRM is already integrated with Liferay will find it much easier with the Mobile SDK to create a mobile app that browses customer records, with each sales rep will have personalized access to their customers.
Mobile apps designed by retail companies for their customers for instance, could take advantage of shopping catalog integration to quickly develop a native mobile e-commerce app. The experience could also be further enhanced with the phone’s camera and location services.
For the long-term, Liferay is hoping that its portal can be used as a central hub that aggregates data and interactions from mobile devices to help companies understand the needs and preferences of their customers and employees. Although in facing privacy issues, Liferay will naturally need to consider how companies can give more control of personal information to the users of the mobile apps they create.
In light of their new Mobile SDK release, Liferay's CTO, Michael Young,had this to say:
“We’re making mobile a priority. Our customers want this for a lot of the same reasons they chose Liferay: they don’t want to keep re-writing the same code for several mobile apps, and they want to consolidate integration points behind a single system. The solutions we’ve come up with for making websites and portals easier to develop cross over well to mobile app development.”
The Liferay Mobile SDK is available as an Eclipse plugin that can be installed into Liferay Developer Studio, Liferay IDE, or a developer’s own Eclipse environment. The Mobile SDK is also now available for download.
To get your hands on a free demo of the Mobile SDK, signing up for the official webinar.
For more information about Liferay and their Mobile SDK, visit their website.
Additionally, be sure to explore more of Liferay via our CMS Directory.