Updating Vaadin inside Liferay - bluesoft-rnd/aperte-workflow-core GitHub Wiki

This page sums up necessary steps one must perform to update Vaadin library and widgetset inside existing Liferay Portal installation.

The best and simplest way to update Vaadin version in Liferay, is to install and use Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay. This tool will allow you to download and install latest version of Vaadin and compile the widgetset accordingly.

Vaadin, being a very active project, releases new versions quite often. Most of the time security patches, bug fixes and optimizations are important and useful. However Liferay 6.0.6 ships with outdated version of Vaadin (6.4), so one should expect that some portlets are going to be broken after a major upgrade e.g. default Liferay Mail (Vaadin) portlet.

Currently, Aperte Workflow requires Vaadin 6.8.3 or newer. It will try to use whatever version of Vaadin is installed on Liferay.

For convenience main Liferay Portal webapp directory is referred below as $LIFERAY_WEBAPP. If one is using default Tomcat bundle, than $LIFERAY_WEBAPP is pointing to $LIFERAY_HOME/tomcat-6.0.29/webapps/ROOT.

Step by step instruction

  1. Navigate to Vaadin Releases
  2. Select desired Vaadin version
  3. Download Vaadin 6 Jar-only for all platforms and Vaadin 6 Liferay update package jars
  4. Delete $LIFERAY_WEBAPP/WEB-INF/lib/vaadin.jar inside Liferay Portal webapp
  5. Move and rename Vaadin 6 Jar-only for all platforms jar to $LIFERAY_WEBAPP/WEB-INF/lib/vaadin.jar. This updates the library.
  6. Extract Vaadin 6 Liferay update package and copy the content into $LIFERAY_WEBAPP/html/VAADIN overwriting all occurring file conflicts. This updates the widgetset.
  7. If one is using custom addons it may be required to rebuild the widgetset localy. This however is not in scope of this tutorial.

Verifing Vaadin version

Just navigate to page containing Vaadin portlet (e.g. Aperte Workflow) and add ?debug to the page url, e.g. http://localhost:8080/?debug for default Aperte Workflow demo installation. Small console should appear in the right bottom corner of the browser window, providing various diagnostic options - including Vaadin widgetset version.