Liferay DevCon 2024: Highlights, Innovations, and What’s Next

Introduction to Liferay Devcon

Liferay DevCon is one of the most anticipated events in the Liferay community, bringing together developers, architects, and enthusiasts from around the world. This year’s conference was no exception, offering a vibrant mix of insightful sessions, hands-on workshops, and opportunities to connect with fellow professionals.

The event spanned three exciting days. The first two were dedicated to a packed schedule of presentations, technical sessions, and product updates, while the third day, known as the "Unconference" offered something different. During the Unconference, attendees proposed their own discussion topics, allowing for open conversations tailored to their interests and challenges. Liferay staff actively participated, sharing their in-house expertise and helping participants to solve real-world challenges.

Not to forget, the event wasn’t just about work. It kicked off with a welcoming opening evening before day one, creating a relaxed atmosphere to meet. Day two concluded with a lively party, giving everyone the chance to unwind, connect, and reflect on the shared experiences of the conference. These moments added to the vibrant, community-focused spirit that makes DevCon so much more than just a tech event.

To many attendees, networking is the most compelling reason to return to DevCon year after year. The opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals, exchange ideas, and build lasting relationships often becomes the highlight of the event, making it much more than just a series of presentations and workshops.

Key Presentations That Set the Tone for DevCon

Before we explore the plans for Liferay’s future, let’s take a moment to reflect on some of the presentations that set the tone for this year’s DevCon. These talks offered valuable perspectives while keeping the audience engaged with humor, historical comparisons, and a touch of inspiration.

First Brian Chan, the CEO and founder of Liferay, began with an intriguing analogy comparing recent years of Liferay to the "dark ages" of the Roman Empire—a time when functionalities were created but didn’t always meet expectations. This paved the way for his vision of a "new era" for Liferay, signaling a renewed focus on innovation and user experience. To illustrate this shift, he presented a demo of Liferay’s upcoming AI capabilities. While the demo took an unexpected turn with the use of the wrong branch (code version), Brian’s quick humor turned the moment into a highlight of the event. It even became a running joke among other speakers, who reassured the audience during their talks with lines like, "Don’t worry, we made sure to use the correct branch!"

Following Brian, Marco Leo offered a short yet impactful overview of Liferay’s strategic direction. His presentation provided a clear glimpse into the platform’s priorities and focus areas, giving attendees a sense of the exciting developments on the horizon.

Closing out the keynotes, Dylan Beattie delivered a standout presentation on open source software. With wit and engaging storytelling, he explored the misconceptions around "free software," explaining how the term originally referred to freedom but is often misunderstood as cost-free. Dylan argued that for open source to thrive, it often cannot be entirely free, backing his points with compelling examples. His sharp humor and infectious energy made this presentation one of the most memorable moments of DevCon.

Liferay’s Roadmap: Key Directions

Liferay’s roadmap for the future was a major highlight of DevCon, with many presentations revolving around new directions. While numerous topics were discussed, several stood out as central themes shaping Liferay’s evolution.

In addition to a brief overview of these roadmap points from Liferay’s perspective, I will also include insights from our experience at InnRay to provide you with a deeper understanding and practical context.

Low Code / No Code: Simplifying Development

One of the biggest trends Liferay is focusing on is the push toward low-code and no-code solutions. The new functionalities they introduced are designed to empower users to create and manage applications with minimal technical expertise. This shift promises to make Liferay more accessible to non-developers while also accelerating development for experienced teams.

From our perspective: While no-code and low-code appear to be primary focuses for Liferay, we still find it quite challenging to fully leverage these approaches in practice. There are some options available, of course, but for real-life scenarios, you often encounter significant limitations. While many of these issues can be resolved, the process is far from the streamlined experience that low-code promises—unless your use case is exceptionally simple.

Commerce: A Continued Priority

Liferay Commerce remains a key focus area. Although these modules were introduced relatively recently, they have seen significant development and enhancements over time. At least for now it seems that Liferay plans to continue investing in this space, which is great news for anyone who already invested in solutions based on it.

From Our Perspective: At InnRay, we work extensively with Liferay Commerce, so we can confidently say that the improvements align with real-world needs - many things which we had to customize on our own in early versions of Commerce were then added into the standard. If you follow the release notes you can see that they really add and update a lot.

There are of course also some downsides: like often with Liferay the API has changed by a lot across versions so updates of early Commerce projects are quite time-consuming.

Client Extensions: The New Way to Customize

Liferay is shifting toward Client Extensions (CX) as the new standard for building custom functionalities. These extensions allow developers to create lightweight, scalable customizations using technologies like JavaScript (e.g., React widgets) and are set to replace traditional OSGi modules in many cases. Whether it’s crafting custom layouts (replacing standard themes with CX, fragments, and content pages), integrating payment or shipping methods, or automating data imports, Client Extensions are incredibly versatile. Client extensions are also meant to make further Liferay migrations (upgrades) easier as they are much less tied to the Liferay Core.

While we’re only scratching the surface here, we plan to explore this topic in greater detail in a future post.

From Our Perspective: Client Extensions appear to be a promising solution to the long-standing update and migration challenges in Liferay. They also represent a significant step forward in embracing more modern technologies, moving away from the outdated reliance on JSPs.

At InnRay, we’ve been using Client Extensions for some time now. While we’ve encountered occasional issues—such as challenges with deployments and replacing old code—they have generally worked well in most scenarios. If you haven’t tried them yet, we believe they’re worth exploring.

Objects: A Modern Approach to Entity Management

Liferay’s Objects feature represents a significant shift in how entities are defined and managed. Built on top of the service builder, Objects are positioned as its modern alternative. While they may not fully replace the service builder, the goal is clear: to encourage users to adopt Objects for faster, more flexible entity management.

From Our Perspective: Liferay developers have been encouraged to adopt Objects for quite some time, and they were a significant topic of discussion at the event. During networking sessions, it became clear that while many people have experimented with Objects, their experiences were mixed—some found success, while others faced challenges.

Although Objects have improved significantly over time, we still find it complicated to integrate them seamlessly with other low-code/no-code features, such as Collections or Collections Display. In our experience, attempting to use Objects without relying on a separate React, JSP, or similar application often leads to roadblocks. At that point, we either revert to alternative implementations or resort to workarounds. On the other hand we find it useful in some cases: for example if you are fine with default UI (for example it is administrators only) and you want to define some post update actions and so on.

Our takeaway: If you’re planning to use Objects as a replacement for SB entities and then integrate them into custom JS applications, they can work well. However, if you’re aiming to build a fully no-code or low-code solution using Objects, it’s worth carefully considering the limitations and potential complexities.

In future we will create more detailed post on when to use and when not to use objects from real projects experience perspective

API Builder: Streamlined API Development

Another low-code addition to Liferay’s toolkit is the new API Builder, which aims to simplify the creation of REST APIs. Unlike the traditional REST Builder, which relied on OpenAPI definitions and required coding, the new API Builder introduces a user-friendly UI-based approach. This allows developers to visually design and configure APIs without delving into Java development, making the process faster and more accessible.

From Our Perspective: The functionality seems promising but is still behind a beta feature flag, which means it’s not fully production-ready. Additionally, there are missing features, such as the ability to create PUT or PATCH requests. At this stage, we recommend sticking with established solutions like REST Builder for production needs.

AI Solutions

Of course, no conference these days would be complete without touching on AI-related topics, and DevCon was no exception. Liferay showcased its ongoing efforts to integrate AI into the platform, including exciting demos of how AI can enhance user experiences, automate processes, and improve decision-making. These advancements signal Liferay’s commitment to staying at the forefront of technological innovation while addressing real-world business challenges. AI is clearly becoming a key focus for Liferay’s future.

From Our Perspective: there were many nice features shown around automated content creation, which we believe will highly improve the speed of creating content. Additionally, tools for automatic issue analysis were demonstrated, offering promising possibilities for the future. However, these are just glimpses of what might be available one day. The reality is that we’re still far from these features being fully realized, making it difficult to predict exactly what the future will hold.

More to come

These were just the highlights of Liferay DevCon 2024. Many other topics were touched on during DevCon, ranging from integrations to platform performance improvements. While covering them all here would be overwhelming, rest assured we’ll dive deeper into some of these areas in upcoming posts.