But in Alfresco 3.4 Community and Enterprise, Alfresco has implemented partial ratings functionality. Right now, it consists of the back-end, repository tier services and it is darn close to what’s in the book.

With the back end in place, I expect Alfresco to release ratings functionality in the Share front-end in an upcoming release. So, I’m somewhat reluctant to package up my ratings stuff and release it as it is partially obsolete in 3.4 anyway. On the other hand, it would give those of you on releases earlier than 3.4 a functional ratings widget, and, with some adjustments, I could make the front-end work with Alfresco’s rating service in 3.4, which would mean functional ratings in Share for those of you that have already upgraded.

If the code was ready to go, I’d just package it up and if only one person used it, great. But, the client we did the widget for was using a heavily customized version of Share–we didn’t integrate the widget into the out-of-the-box document library or document details page. That’s the last bit of work that needs to be done. Even if there is no interest, I might do it anyway just to have as an example. But, I’d be even more motivated if there were folks out there who would use it in their production implementations.

So what do you say? Any interest? Take the survey below and let me know.

So, if you’re reading the book and you’re finding a couple of problems with the source code on Alfresco versions after 3.2 Enterprise, go get a version that matches up with the chapter you are on and the release of Alfresco you are running, and see if it fixes the problem.

I’ve now validated that the code works with the following versions:

• Alfresco 2.2.4 Enterprise
• Alfresco 3d Labs
• Alfresco 3.0.1 Enterprise
• Alfresco 3.1.1 Enterprise
• Alfresco 3.2 Community
• Alfresco 3.2 Enterprise
• Alfresco 3.3 Community
• Alfresco 3.3 Enterprise
• Alfresco 3.4c Community
• Alfresco 3.4 Enterprise

Most of it hasn’t changed terribly much. The BootstrapAuthorityCreator class, which you don’t need unless you are playing with the AMP example in Appendix C, isn’t working yet due to changes in the AuthorityService with 3.2 Enterprise.

The biggest change is in the LDAP configuration (Chapter 9). Overall, setting up LDAP authentication and chaining has gotten much easier in 3.2 Enterprise. But the configuration is much different than in previous releases (See the Alfresco wiki pages on Subsystems and the Authentication Subsystem for more info).

I don’t have CAS SSO working with 3.2 Enterprise quite yet, so the authentication filter included in the Chapter 9 source code is commented out for now.

Earlier this year they had a nomination process which resulted in readers choosing me as a finalist. Getting that far was really cool and I definitely want to say thanks to the readers of the book and the blog for making that happen.

The next step was a round of judging. This took a while and I can’t imagine the process whereby you get a panel of judges, with different backgrounds and full-time jobs (I assume) to look at six technical books that cover a wide range of topics (Alfresco, Drupal, Ext JS, JavaScript, and SOA) and subsequently make sense of the feedback. Definitely a big thanks to Packt and the panel of judges who worked hard to make this happen.

The book was certainly a team effort. I had a great team of technical reviewers, and they were instrumental. I think it’s also important to recognize my firm, Optaros, because the project couldn’t have happened without their support and encouragement. The entire Alfresco team also got behind it in one way or another and that was important to the success as well.

Alright, enough said. I’ll quit before I start working my way down the family tree. Maybe Twitter’s length restriction really is the best thing for an acceptance speech. Thanks, again, to everyone involved!

I originally wrote the Alfresco Developer Guide source code for Alfresco 2.2 Enterprise and Alfresco 3 Labs. The code was pretty much the same regardless of which one you were running. For things that did happen to be different, I handled those with separate projects: one for community-specific stuff and one for enterprise-specific stuff. This was pretty much limited to minor web script differences for the “client extensions” projects and LDAP configuration differences for the “server extension” project.

With the release of 3.2 Community, I realized:

• The number of different flavors of Alfresco any given reader might be running are going up, not down. Who knows when 2.2 Enterprise will be sunset.
• It is no longer as easy as “Enterprise” versus “Labs/Community” because multiple releases of the same flavor are prevalent (2.2E, 3.0E, and 3.1E, for example).
• Tagging my code in Subversion by Chapter alone is no longer enough–I need to tag by Chapter and by Alfresco version.
• Sending the publisher the code one chapter at-a-time and expecting them to manage updates and deciding how to organize all of the chapter code was a bad idea.

So, I’ve done some work to make this better (reorg the projects, restructure the download files). I’ve also tested the example code from each chapter against the latest service packs for all releases since 2.2 Enterprise. That includes making some small updates to get the examples running on 3.2 Community.

You can now download either all of the source for every version I tested against, or, download the source that works for a specific version. It may take the official download site at Packt a while to get the new files, so here are links to download them from my site:

Alfresco Developer Guide example source code for…

• Alfresco 2.2 Enterprise (~5.3 MB, Download)
• Alfresco 3.0 Labs (~5.6 MB, Download)
• Alfresco 3.0 Enterprise (~5.7 MB, Download)
• Alfresco 3.1 Enterprise (~5.6 MB, Download)
• Alfresco 3.2 Community (~5.7 MB, Download)
• Alfresco 3.2 Enterprise (~5.9 MB, Download)
• All of the above, combined (~28.1 MB, Download)

Hopefully this makes it easier for you to grab only what you need and makes it clear that each Eclipse project contains only what’s needed to work with that version of Alfresco. Deployment is easier too. Most of the time, it’s just the “someco-client-extensions” project that you deploy.

Now that I’ve got everything structured like I want it, as new versions of Alfresco are released, it should be much easier to keep up.

1. Visit the Alfresco Developer Guide Book Page
2. Click the “ADD TO CART” button to add the book to your shopping cart
3. Enter AlfrescoDG-3117 in the “Promotional Code” field and click the “Update Button”. The discounted price should now be reflected in your order.

After your book arrives, if you read it and decide it was the best Packt book published in 2008, you should take a minute to vote for the Alfresco Developer Guide in Packt’s Author of the Year awards. Voting ends May 25.

• A free chapter can be downloaded from the Alfresco Content Community. You’ll need an Alfresco Content Community login (it’s free).
• One of my Optaros colleagues, Olivier Pépin, and I, originally wrote a chapter on Optaros’ open source alternative web client, DoCASU, but we had to make it a download for space reasons. You can download the “bonus chapter” from Optaros (email address required).
• Appendix C talks about installing Alfresco, AMPs, import/export, and Surf. This was originally intended to be included in the book as well, but it’s been provided as a download instead.

So, if you own a copy of the book and it is missing the acknowledgements, consider it a collector’s item. Hopefully, Packt will fix this problem before too many more get shipped. To the reader it isn’t an issue, but to me it is a big deal because it is important to express my appreciation to the large group of folks that made this project come together. It certainly wasn’t a solo effort. So, until this gets fixed, here is the elusive acknowledgements section.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without Optaros. What an awesome place to work and what a stellar team to work with. Thanks to Bob Gett, Mavis Chin, and Marc Osofsky for providing an incredible level of senior leadership support. Dave Gynn, John Eckman, and Seth Gottlieb (we miss you, Seth!) also provided early inspiration and counsel. Noreen Vincent helped with marketing and promo. Optaros colleagues from around the world rolled up their sleeves and dug in with code and technical editing: Olivier Pépin, Brian Doyal, Xavier Naud, Jens Scheutter, Alan Fehr, and Michael Ruflin all gave incredible amounts of thorough and thoughtful feedback. The book is significantly better than it would have been because of your involvement.

Alfresco has been tremendously supportive of and excited about this project. Thanks to John Powell, John Newton, Matt Asay, Dr. Ian Howells, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Luis Sala, Phil Robinson, Michael Uzquiano, and Nancy Garrity for providing information and support and for building such a cool platform. Alfresco team members also pitched in with technical reviews: David Caruana, James Urquhart, Jean Barmash, and Peter Monks spent time reading chapters and providing feedback when they probably should have been cranking out 3.0 code.

David Barnes at Packt Publishing deserves thanks for suggesting the project and getting it on track. Rajashree Hamine and Nikhil Bangera have done a great job holding me to task and handling everything on the Packt side.

My ecmarchitect.com readers deserve a big thanks. Your helpful feedback and encouragement motivated me to keep posting. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Finally, to Christy, Justin, and Caroline: Thank you for putting up with the late nights and lost weekends, providing so much encouragement, and being so understanding.

There are a lot of people who made this thing happen including an awesome team of colleagues at Optaros, the entire Alfresco crew, the Packt team, and the support of my family. I’ve expressed my thanks individually in the acknowledgments and I hope I haven’t left anyone out.

I’m pretty excited how the book turned out. One of my roles as the Director of the ECM Practice is to get our consultants and our clients up to speed on open source CMS technology like Alfresco. I tried to organize the book in the same way I cover these topics in-person so the book flows just like it would if you and I were sitting in a room and you said, “I’ve been poking around with Alfresco on my own but now I’m ready to really start to do something with it.” I start with core fundamentals (content modeling, actions, behaviors, extractors) and gradually work “outward” through web client customizations, web scripts, advanced workflow, WCM, and security.

The book’s title has “developer guide” in it for a reason: It is more of a tutorial than it is an exhaustive reference. I figured with resources available like the wiki, the forums, and the source code, it was more important and helpful to step you through real-world examples.

My hope is that this book flattens the learning curve for everyone. And maybe in some way it will encourage companies that feel stuck in their currently legacy CMS to explore options.