A Modern Tech Stack That Developers Actually Want
One of the quiet revolutions in Liferay DXP has been the gradual shedding of proprietary or insular technologies in favor of more standard, community-backed tools. For years, Liferay leaned on in-house frameworks like Alloy UI and Senna.js — decisions that made sense in context but ultimately created friction. Developers had to learn “Liferay’s way” of doing things, which often diverged from the broader JavaScript and frontend ecosystem.
That’s no longer the case.
Modern Liferay DXP now encourages — and in many places defaults to — technologies that frontend engineers already know and love. Think React, ES6+ JavaScript, standard npm build tooling, and support for frameworks like Vue or Angular through its flexible client extension model. The move away from Alloy and Senna isn’t just a shift in libraries; it’s a philosophical shift in how Liferay approaches developer experience.
You no longer have to fight the framework. You can bring in familiar tools, work within standard project structures, and apply the same engineering practices you’d use in any modern web stack. This makes it dramatically easier for teams to onboard, collaborate, and scale without the historical friction of a steep proprietary learning curve.
More importantly, it signals that Liferay is listening — adapting its stack not just for performance or modularity but to meet developers where they are. It aligns with modern front-end development practices and supports building composable, low-maintenance applications.
This shift should come as welcome news for teams that may have had a less-than-stellar experience with Liferay in the past. Rather than clinging to legacy frameworks and insular design decisions, the product has steadily moved toward convergence with mainstream development paradigms. This makes Liferay DXP a wise choice for digital experience projects and organizations that prioritize maintainability and future readiness in their technical stack.
Liferay Fragments: Modular UI for Faster Delivery
Liferay Fragments have become a central piece of the platform’s frontend strategy, not just as content building blocks but as a means of bringing design flexibility and frontend control into the hands of both developers and business users. Introduced as part of Liferay’s push to decouple content from rigid templates, fragments allow for modular UI composition that’s reusable, maintainable, and adaptable. Unlike legacy page layouts or portlet-based UIs that often relied on backend development for even minor content updates, fragments are HTML+CSS+JS blocks that can be assembled visually via the page editor or programmatically deployed as structured frontend components. This accelerates content updates and iteration cycles, especially in content-heavy environments like public sites or customer portals.
From a developer’s perspective, fragments offer a happy medium: you can still author them using familiar tooling (local dev with npm, Git integration, etc.), but you also get the ability to empower non-technical users through visual editing and composition. The separation of concerns is clean — frontend developers define the look and logic, while marketers or content editors control their use.
Fragments can also consume mapped content from Liferay’s Headless APIs or Asset framework, making them dynamic and configurable. With the right design, fragments act like mini components that support localization, personalization, and reuse across multiple experiences.
Liferay has also matured its support for fragment collection management, allowing teams to organize, version, and distribute fragments across environments in a controlled manner. You can push fragments through development, QA, and production via your CI/CD pipeline, enabling safe and predictable deployments.
This is critical in enterprise scenarios where promoting changes through multiple environments requires structured governance. Fragments now support inline editing, preview modes, and mapping to custom fields or object data. These enhancements reduce the overhead of presentation management while enabling high-quality, brand-consistent UI patterns across your digital experiences.
In many ways, fragments have become a transitional tool for organizations modernizing their Liferay implementation. They offer a path toward frontend modernization without demanding a full leap into micro frontends or decoupled apps. For teams that aren’t ready to jump into Client Extensions or headless architectures, fragments provide a low-friction way to build modern UIs — and an opportunity to shift ownership of presentation from backend developers to cross-functional teams.
Client Extensions: Decoupled Frontends for a Composable World
While Fragments offers a flexible entry point into modern UI development, Client Extensions (CEs) take it further, enabling proper frontend decoupling. Unlike Fragments, which are deployed within Liferay, Client Extensions are registered with Liferay but hosted externally. This separation is foundational to Liferay’s composable architecture vision.
By defining a Client Extension via a .json or .yml configuration and pointing to hosted assets (JavaScript bundles, CSS files, web components), developers can integrate custom applications with Liferay without touching its server. No WAR files, no OSGi deployments — just clean separation of runtime and codebase.
Client Extensions empower teams to use their preferred frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, etc.), choose their hosting strategy (CDN, S3, etc.), and iterate independently of Liferay’s deployment cycles. Yet once registered, these assets behave like native features — participating in pages, navigation, and admin tools. This architecture aligns with modern principles of composable DXPs: separation of concerns, flexible deployment, API-driven integration, and framework-agnostic UI components. Client Extensions allow teams to deliver user-centric experiences faster and with fewer operational constraints.
They also open the door for integration at scale. For example, Client Extensions can be used to embed third-party widgets, render dynamic charts from external APIs, or launch complex single-page applications that share context with Liferay but operate independently. This flexibility enables product teams to bring new features to market faster without waiting on core platform upgrades or backend coordination.
Client Extensions preserve the integration power Liferay is known for but remove the operational coupling that is used to make customizations risky or brittle. This makes them essential for organizations seeking to implement scalable and secure digital frontends that keep pace with modern web development.
Service Builder was the default way to model and persist custom entities in Liferay for years. It was powerful but required deep Java expertise, XML configuration, and deployment-heavy workflows. Liferay Objects change that paradigm completely.
Objects offer a low-code, metadata-driven alternative to Service Builder. Developers and power users can create objects directly via the UI or APIs, instantly gaining full persistence, relationships, permissions, workflows, validations, and REST endpoints — without writing Java or redeploying code.
This dramatically accelerates delivery cycles. Because Objects are dynamic, teams can iterate on business logic, UI integration, and data structure with minimal risk and no need for server restarts or full-stack changes.
Objects also support complex data modeling features like many-to-many relationships, calculated fields, and custom views. They’re fully integrated into Liferay’s ecosystem, including search, permissions, and, most importantly, headless APIs. For teams focused on rapid prototyping, agile iteration, or MVP delivery, Objects provide a significant productivity boost.
Perhaps most importantly, Objects represent a philosophical change. Instead of assuming that business logic needs to live in custom Java services or backend modules, Objects enables declarative modeling with extensibility hooks. This aligns with industry trends toward metadata-driven platforms and gives teams a future-proof foundation for growing their business capabilities without sacrificing governance.
Faster Workflows and Headless APIs with Liferay Objects
Liferay Objects integrates tightly with workflows, making it easy to define approval processes, automation logic, and task assignments around your custom entities. With no boilerplate code, teams can attach workflows that mirror real-world business processes and adapt them quickly.
Each object also comes with a fully generated headless REST API — documented via OpenAPI, filterable, sortable, and secure. This makes it easy to plug Liferay into external systems, mobile apps, or frontend frameworks using a consistent, standards-based approach.
You can also use GraphQL to query custom object data, and because Liferay enforces permission checks at the API layer, you get secure access control out of the box. Whether you’re building custom dashboards, progressive web apps, or integrating with RPA workflows, Objects gives you a robust, low-code interface to manage core business logic.
The result is a highly composable architecture where data, logic, and integration can all be declaratively defined, iterated, and scaled. Liferay Objects provides a pragmatic foundation for low-code and API-first development that fits naturally within larger digital ecosystems.
Composable Architecture and Enterprise Integration Made Real
At its core, Liferay DXP is built for platform unification. It’s not about replacing all your enterprise systems — it’s about composing a coherent user experience from diverse sources. Whether integrating CRM, ERP, CMS, or proprietary apps, Liferay acts as the system of engagement that ties it all together.
This is where composable architecture becomes more than theory. With Objects, Client Extensions, Fragments, and Headless APIs, Liferay gives teams a toolkit to aggregate and present data and services across the enterprise, all while maintaining UX consistency, access control, and branding.
Consider a common case: customer onboarding. You need data from identity providers, CRM, legal document repositories, and product catalogs. Liferay enables you to build that journey using a mix of headless APIs, mapped objects, and frontend components — without creating a monolithic app or duplicating backend logic.
Because Liferay supports external API consumption, proxying, and embedded components, teams can compose experiences incrementally, aligning with agile delivery and cloud-native practices. No re-platforming is required.
Liferay integrates well with CI/CD pipelines, configuration-as-code tools, and observability stacks. This makes it ideal for organizations that embrace DevOps and want to automate governance across their composable architecture.
Ultimately, Liferay DXP stands out as a composable digital experience platform not because of any one feature but because of how well its capabilities integrate. It lets enterprise teams unify data, workflows, and interfaces in a scalable, maintainable, and future-ready way. Liferay is a wise strategic choice in an age where digital agility is a competitive advantage.
Real-World Use Cases for Liferay’s Composable Architecture
Liferay DXP’s composable architecture isn’t just theory—it’s powering real solutions in various industries. Here are a few enterprise scenarios where Liferay’s flexibility, integration capability, and user experience framework deliver tangible value:
- Government Service Portals: Public sector organizations use Liferay to consolidate citizen services into a single digital entry point. Identity integration, multilingual support, secure workflows, and adaptive interfaces make Liferay ideal for public-facing portals.
- Higher Education Engagement Platforms: Universities and colleges use Liferay’s low-code tools and client extensions to build student and faculty portals. Personalized dashboards, course data integration, and event management are stitched together from disparate systems into unified digital experiences.
- Financial Services Onboarding Workflows: Banks and insurance providers use Liferay Objects and workflows to orchestrate complex onboarding and document review processes. Liferay’s permissions model ensures regulatory compliance while allowing external access where needed.
- Public Utility Company Portals: Utility providers leverage Liferay’s headless APIs and customizable UIs to surface account management tools, outage reporting, and usage dashboards—all integrated with billing and infrastructure management systems.
- Healthcare Provider Networks: Hospitals and care networks use Liferay to connect EMR systems, scheduling tools, and patient-facing content into HIPAA-compliant web applications that support seamless experiences across care journeys.
These examples show how Liferay DXP adapts to highly regulated, complex environments, enabling rapid development and consistent UX without re-platforming.
Summary: Putting Composability Into Practice
Liferay DXP is more than a digital experience platform — it’s a foundation for building modular, scalable, and future-proof enterprise applications. Its evolution toward a composable architecture is evident in its support for externally hosted frontends, low-code data modeling, and API-first integration.
For developers, it means using familiar tools and workflows. For architects, it offers a flexible framework for unifying disparate systems. And for businesses, it provides a pathway to faster innovation without sacrificing governance or scalability.
To understand how XTIVIA can help you adapt to a composable architecture using Liferay, please engage with us via comments on this blog post or contact us at http://www.xtivia.com/contact/ or [email protected]. Our experts can guide you through planning, implementation, and long-term success using Liferay DXP as a core component of your digital experience strategy.