Mastering Backend Liferay Client Extensions

Liferay offers powerful APIs and services for creating unified applications. While Liferay DXP includes extensive OOTB capabilities, unique business requirements may necessitate customization and enhancement to leverage the platform’s full potential. To address these needs, Liferay provides backend client extensions.

Client extensions are the go-to solution for extending Liferay DXP’s backend capabilities, whether you need to orchestrate external workflows and notifications or add custom business logic. Living outside the portal container, client extensions interface with Liferay solely through its APIs. This decoupled architecture avoids directly modifying Liferay’s core and offers several advantages:

• Reduced Maintenance: Minimizes the risk of conflicts and reduces maintenance overhead by applying the same configurations or objects to multiple environments programmatically.
• Development Freedom: Empowers calling custom services or functions via headless APIs using the programming languages or technologies of your choice. 
• Performance and Scalability Optimization: Enables users to offload processing to external services to improve performance and scalability.
• Deployment Versatility: Supports all Liferay deployment models (i.e., Liferay SaaS, Liferay PaaS, and Liferay Self-Hosted), unlike traditional plugins, which are incompatible with SaaS deployments.

This combination of benefits makes client extensions a robust and future-proof solution for extending your Liferay DXP implementation.

This course explores Liferay backend client extensions and demonstrates how to leverage these extensions to extend Liferay DXP's capabilities. Prior to starting this course, you should be familiar with

• The basics of Client Extensions (Foundations of Liferay Client Extensions). 
• Liferay workspaces and developer tooling (Mastering Liferay Workspaces and Tooling).
• Modeling with Liferay Objects (Mastering Data Modeling with Liferay Objects). 

Basic understanding of general programming and deployment concepts is assumed, though knowledge of specific programming languages is not required.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to

• Connect external systems to Liferay through client extensions.
• Build and deploy backend microservice, batch, and configuration client extensions.
• Migrate data and configurations between Liferay environments.
• Implement business logic that extends Liferay’s workflow and object frameworks.
• Package client extensions leveraging popular frameworks like Spring Boot and NodeJS.
• Use OAuth2 to secure communication between your client extensions and Liferay DXP.

This course leads you through the process of developing a variety of client extension solutions for a fictional company, Clarity Vision Solutions. Before diving into the technical aspects of building and deploying client extensions, you’ll learn about Clarity and their critical success factors.