Portlet in Action - MEAP launched

Manning has launched the MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) for Portlets in Action (http://www.manning.com/sarin/).

The first chapter is available for free download and it talks about Portals and Portlets in general. To get you quickly started with development, the first chapter explains installing / using Liferay and developing a Hello World portlet. The detailed TOC for chapter 1 is as follows:

1.1 What is Portal?

1.2 Portal benefits

1.2.1 Enriched User Experience

1.2.2 Compliments Web Applications

Bridge Information gap

Inter-Portlet Communication

1.3 What is Portlet?

1.3.1 Pluggable User Interface

1.4 Why Portlets?

1.5 Portal Infrastructure

1.5.1 Portlet Container

Lifecycle Management

Portability

1.5.2 Portal Server

Choosing a portal server

1.6 Getting started with Liferay Portal Server

1.6.1 Installing Liferay Portal Server 5.2.2

1.6.2 Using Liferay

1.7 Setting up the Development Environment

1.7.1 Configure Eclipse IDE

1.7.2 Create Project Structure

1.8 Hello World Portlet Example

1.8.1 Create HelloWorld Portlet

Portlet class

portlet settings

Resource Bundle

Add Portlet to liferay category

Configure liferay-specific features

1. 8.2 Building Hello World project

ANT build tool

Ant build script

Add JARs

Building the project

1.8.3 Add Hello World portlet

1.9 Summary

It was fun writing chapter 3 and 4, because of Spring Portlet MVC. Though Spring 3.0 is in RC1 but it is packed with lot of new and interesting topics: integration with JSR 303 and 330, new annotations for identifying portlet methods, and so on. I will write in more detail about chapter 3 and 4, once its ready for next MEAP release.