Formica @ Liferay Devcon 2019
Our recap on Liferay Devcon 2019 in Mainz.
DEVCON 2019 took place in Mainz at Halle 45 for its 7th edition. Once again, the tracks were very diverse: DevOps, Backend, Frontend, new features, workshops, Liferay Commerce… The list was endless, making it often hard to chose between 3 simultaneous tracks.
Liferay Commerce 2.0
Liferay Commerce has always been focusing on the B2B segment, allowing integration with business-critical systems like an ERP for example. In Commerce 2.0, Liferay enhanced the customer experience by providing multi-site catalogs that allow you to share product catalogs on the entire platform and building different catalogs based on complex rules. Products or catalogs can be exposed to other eCommerce platforms as well. So next to multi-site (on Liferay), the platform also enables a multi-channel approach. Read our blogpost for our take on B2B E-commerce.
Liferay also added some new features to the mix. With “product recommendations” and “product comparison”, it is now possible for e-commerce shops to cross-sell their products.
Data engine
Data engine is not new, as it replaced Dynamic Data Lists in order to be used with Forms. The possibility for business users and developers to build low code solutions using data engine definitely is. Data can be exposed through the API which meaning it can be consumed anywhere you want. Keeping in mind it also became easier to build and deploy frontend widgets (applications built with React, Vue or Angular), this means small applications can get built in a more simple and fast manner. On the roadmap: integration with the workflow engine.
Liferay js-toolkit
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, we can easily create pure frontend applications with the js-toolkit. This means you can build a widget without having to create backend code and still benefit from Liferay features such as localization, authentication…
Leveraging the platform with new technologies
We’ve seen real-world examples of technologies such as augmented reality, demonstrated in front of the audience at Liferay Devcon. SMC Treviso integrated augmented reality with Liferay Commerce, allowing customers to display a 3D model of a product in their own office or living room.
We also saw a demo on the implementation of a chatbot, which was a nice example of AI leveraging the platform. Even though this technology is not quite and we know Valamis has been offering their own chatbot for a while now. It was none the less very interesting to get an insight into the steps and decisions that led to this open-source solution.
The roadmap for 7.3
The main goal for Liferay in the future will be to offer more out of the box features. This was already quite obvious from a lot of the sessions:
- Improvement in content authoring with inline editing of structured content
- Improvements in multilingual friendly URL’s
- Build lists more easily with fragments
- Project based change management instead of staging, with implementation of collaboration (commenting the changes) and roll back feature
- Data engine features: allowing to create entities through the UI, create table views
- Extended front-end tooling
- Revise theming
- Data driven content authoring: performance tips, content performance updates, provide dashboard
- Record pages: fragments communicating with each other, integrating workflows
Formica is excited to get going with Liferay's brand new features! You missed Liferay Devcon but want to have some more information? All the content is available online and you can always contact us for more information.
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