UpdatingVaadinInsideLiferay

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

Step by step instruction

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 However Liferay 6.0.6 ships with outdated version of Vaadin (6.4), so one should expect that some portlets are going to be broken after a major upgrade e.g. default Liferay Mail (Vaadin) portlet.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 Reports requires Vaadin 6.7.4.

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-*/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

Vaadin version may be verified with handy tool, Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay.