Increasingly IDEs are providing tools for developing portlets. This is usually a good option for rapid application development, mainly if you already have the knowledge set of that tool. In this case the IDE must allow adding Liferay specific descriptors as explained in chapter 3. The result provided by the IDE must be a WAR file that can be deployed to Liferay using the method described in Chapter 4.

Using tools such as ant or maven it's not difficult to create an environment to create portlet applications that are packaged as WAR and deployed by copying that file to the autodeploy directory in a Liferay installation.

This environment provides a ready to use ant based system for developing portlets and customizing Liferay Portal in general. It is the option that gives most flexibility and access to all Liferay specific APIs. Use this environment if you want to use the portlet frameworks provided by Liferay such as JSPPortlet and StrutsPortlet described in chapter 3. For detailed information about this environment read Liferay Portal 4 - Development in the Extension Environment.