Vaadin IPC for Liferay add-on

For Vaadin users, I just finished writing documentation for the Vaadin IPC for Liferay add-on yesterday. The version 1.0 of the add-on will be released tomorrow I think. The add-on is very very useful if you want to have two portlets that communicate with each other on the same page. The add-on uses standard Liferay JavaScript event API, so the other portlets can be any Ajax portlets, not just Vaadin.

Here's how it works:


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The LiferayIPC is a Vaadin component that you add in the main window (layout). The inter-portlet communication is done between the client-side widgets.

LiferayIPC liferayipc = new LiferayIPC();
layout.addComponent(liferayipc);
...
liferayipc.sendEvent("hello", "This is Data");

To receive an event in other portlets, you define a LiferayIPCEventListener as follows:

liferayipc.addListener("hello", new LiferayIPCEventListener() {
    public void eventReceived(LiferayIPCEvent event) {
        getWindow().showNotification(
           "Received hello: " + event.getData());
    }
});

The add-on package includes this nice demo WAR that you can just deploy in Liferay. It demonstrates how to send and receive inter-portlet events.



You can combine this client-side communication method with server-side inter-portlet communication, for example, by using portlet session attributes. You may need to do that for security reasons or if you need to send large amount of data. In such case, you just send a client-side notification that says: "Hey, there's new server-side data available, read it now."

So, go ahead and read the new section in the Book of Vaadin. It explains everything. If it doesn't...go and ask in the Vaadin forum.