I am always intrigued by technology implementations that accelerate my ability to create robust solutions, especially when they are well architected, proven to scale, and economical.  There are a couple of recent announcements from Liferay that I feel fit this description and are worth looking into:

 Liferay Screens 1.0

This exciting new offering further strengthens Liferay’s mobile offerings and simplifies the creation of native iOS and Android apps that leverage Liferay data.

Liferay already provides native application support for iOS and Android devices via the Mobile SDK in Liferay 6.2, however, Liferay Screens leverages this SDK to simplify and accelerate native application development accessing Liferay.  Screens hides the complexity of calling Liferay’s remote services and provides IDE tooling to connect components in order to leverage Liferay features.  The Screens architecture separates presentation and business logic via proven patterns and allows for reusability, extensibility, and theme versatility of visual components.

Jose M. Navarro has a great summary in his blog (http://www.liferay.com/web/jose.navarro/blog/-/blogs/liferay-screens-1-0-is-out- ) where he says:

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“Liferay Portal provides a lot of ready-to-use features and they’re exposed in websites through portlets, but… how can I expose that same functionality in a native app? Since the Mobile SDK is the plumbing to consume Liferay’s APIs in an easy way, why not to follow the portlet-like approach in the mobile world?”

More details on Liferay Screens can be found here:  https://www.liferay.com/screens

Liferay Events: An Open Source Mobile App

For many years Liferay has been providing a mobile application to attendees of their major conferences so that they can “see up-to-date agendas, speaker info, session data, and a bunch of other features that enhance the attendee experience”.  “The app is an example that showcases the real-world use of Liferay as a mobile data provider to a rich native app experience. It has been used at many of our events with thousands of attendees, speakers, sponsors, sessions, and more.”   See more information on James Falkner’s blog at http://www.liferay.com/web/james.falkner/blog/-/blogs/liferay-events-an-open-source-mobile-app

Liferay is providing the source code to this app, so go check out the features and functionality that you can leverage in your mobile app efforts.