Category: Alfresco DevCon

Upgrading from Alfresco SDK 3.0 to 4.0

Alfresco recently announced the beta release of SDK 4.0. The release is long-overdue. Developers had become frustrated that Alfresco published generally-available releases of the platform while seemingly ignoring the fact that there was no compatible SDK that could be used to customize and extend version 6.x of the platform. At DevCon this week, Alfresco said they recognize that was not handled as best as it could have been and pushed hard to get the new release out.

Version 4.0 of the SDK uses the same familiar structure that developers used in previous versions and continues to use Maven for dependency management and packaging. But there are some significant changes happening under-the-covers.

Prior releases of the SDK used an embedded version of Tomcat and an in-memory database to allow devs to launch and run Alfresco, along with their customizations, without having to separately download and install the platform. Adding in a tool that does hot Java class reloading such as JRebel or Hotswap Agent adds a greater productivity boost because changes to things like actions, behaviors, and web scripts can be run immediately, with no restart in most cases.

From a developer’s perspective, your “flow” doesn’t change–the SDK still bootstraps your project into a familiar structure and runs Alfresco with your changes, along with hot-swapping, if you want. The SDK no longer uses embedded Tomcat and H2. Instead, it relies on Docker and Docker Compose. When developers run an SDK project, images from Docker Hub (Community Edition) or Quay.io (Enterprise Edition) are downloaded, overlayed with the developer’s customizations, and launched.

If that sounds painful, relax, it’s not that bad. And the SDK 4.0 docs have everything you need to get productive quickly.

If you’re like me, though, you have many projects, open source and otherwise, that you must now upgrade so you can test them against 6.x. Doing it manually isn’t terrible but it is a bit mind-numbing and can be error-prone. Never fear, though; for help, read on!

Lots of projects to upgrade? DevCon hackers have you covered!

I had the pleasure of participating in the Hack-a-Thon at DevCon again this year, organized, as usual, by community icon, Axel Faust. I wasn’t sure what project I would work on when I woke up that morning, but when I saw there was a group of folks interested in working with SDK 4.0, I joined the team.

First, the group of eight fellow hackers started testing the SDK. For many it was their first time working with SDK 4.0. Windows, MacOS, and Linux were all represented and the group covered the various types of archetypes (all-in-one, repo-only, share-only). Every developer was successful bootstrapping a project and launching the Docker containers using the script that ships with the SDK.

JRebel has worked fine for me in SDK 4.0 for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition, but no one in the group could get HotSwap Agent, the free alternative to JRebel, working. Filip promised to file a issue on Github, so hopefully it is easy to fix.

While the crew of testers were hammering away, I documented the steps needed to upgrade from 3.0 to 4.0 and filed a pull request to add that to the already-helpful SDK 4.0 documentation. Ole has already merged it. Thanks, Ole!

With the upgrade steps documented and the rest of the team familiar with the tool, we moved on to the next phase: Automating the upgrade. The result is a new Github project called alfresco-sdk-upgrader that you can leverage to upgrade your own SDK projects. It isn’t as full-featured as we wanted. For example, if you’ve customized your SDK pom files you’ll need to manually merge those changes. But I think it is still useful in its current state.

Here’s a video of the script in action:

You can see that I start out with a project based on SDK 3.0.1. The alfresco-sdk-upgrader script does everything needed to convert it from SDK 3.0.1 to 4.0. After it runs, the video shows the new project structure and then you can see that the run script fires up the Docker containers.

Mitch and Omar did a lot of work on the script. I don’t think any of us were planning on writing bash when we arrived that morning, but they happily rolled up their sleeves and knocked it out. We’d love it if you’d test it out on your projects and, if you feel so inclined, make it better by filing a pull request.

Even if you don’t want to use the script, you should give SDK 4.0 a try while it is still in beta so you can provide your feedback. And, if you’re curious about what other fun stuff got cranked out a the Hack-a-Thon, take a look here.

Photo Credit: Upgrade in Progress by Ged Carroll, CC-by-2.0

Alfresco announces DevCon 2019 for Edinburgh in January

Alfresco Software, Inc. has announced that DevCon 2019 will be in Edinburgh, Scotland from January 29 – 31.

Registration opens August 1st with Early Bird registrations costing €199. Full Regular Admissions will be €249.

The format of the conference is the same as past conferences: The first day will be a hack-a-thon followed by two full days of conference sessions.

The conference would be nothing without great content so you should submit a talk. This is a technical conference, so technical how-to’s, technical case studies, and deep dives are all areas to consider. There will be 30-minute sessions, 45-minute sessions, lightning talks, and longer workshops.

I’m excited to see DevCon happening again. It’s always fun to catch up in-person with members of the community and to hear what everyone’s been working on.

I’m less excited about the venue. Don’t get me wrong–I want to visit Scotland. Just not in January. Last year, when Scotland was mentioned as a possibility, even the Scots in the audience were like, “Please, no! Don’t come to Scotland in January!”. But I guess it’s a way for Alfresco to cut costs. They often bring lots of engineers so reducing travel costs from London can make a big difference in the budget for the event.

Oh well, this isn’t a vacation and most of our time will be spent indoors attending sessions from the community and the Alfresco engineers, so grab a sweater, get registered, and we’ll see you in January!

 

Future of Alfresco Share Remains Foggy After DevCon

CORRECTION: The original version of this post attributed comments to John Knowles. John wasn’t at DevCon. The comments should have been attributed to Mark Heath, VP of Product Development. Also, the ADF announcement was at BeeCon 2016 in Brussels. Sorry for the mistake and thanks to alert readers for the correction.

This week Alfresco held a conference for its developer community in Lisbon, Portugal. Alfresco has been very focused on its new Alfresco Developer Framework (ADF) in terms of both marketing and engineering, and that was reflected in this year’s conference program.

However, there has been a lot of confusion and concern amongst customers and the rest of the community regarding the future of Share, the out-of-the-box web client that ships with Alfresco. In this post, I’m going to focus on why there is confusion, what, if anything, got cleared up during the conference, and speculate on what might happen going forward.

Summary of Customers’ Concerns

Alfresco Share was originally built using a proprietary framework called Surf. It was immediately controversial because even at that time (roughly 2009) there were widely-used frameworks that Alfresco could have chosen to build upon, but didn’t.

Fast forward to BeeCon 2016 in Brussels when Alfresco announced it would build a new framework featuring components based on the popular AngularJS framework. This was a welcome announcement because it painted an appealing vision of a future where a broader community of developers would be able to develop applications using well-known frameworks and established skills. But it also caused concern because, for the seven years prior, customers had been configuring and extending Alfresco Share in a myriad of ways ranging from small tweaks to massive custom applications. With Alfresco building a new developer framework, it seemed unlikely that Share, built on the old, proprietary framework, would have much of a future.

Another concern is about what a customer can expect when they install Alfresco in terms of base functionality. Alfresco Share was created when the company was going after Microsoft SharePoint, so it includes basic document management as well as some light collaboration features. A central question customers have is whether or not Alfresco will eventually replace Alfresco Share with something else, and, if so, will it address the “light collaboration” use case. Until this week Alfresco was largely silent on this point.

What We Learned about the Future of Share at DevCon

During the conference, Richard Esplin, one of Alfresco’s product managers, showed a slide that confirmed what had previously been speculated: Alfresco Share will be deprecated–some day. Most found this unsurprising, but it was the first time Alfresco had made a public statement to that effect.

This was touched upon again by Thomas DeMeo, Alfresco’s VP of Product Management. During the closing Q & A session he answered a question about the future of Share by saying (paraphrasing), “Will there be another Share? No there will not be another Share. But as the ADF continues to evolve we will release more components which could be used to build all kinds of apps”. I think some people heard, “There will be no Share replacement”, but I interpreted this as “There will not be a feature-by-feature port of Alfresco Share to ADF called Share” and my interpretation was confirmed by multiple high-level Alfresco employees, although I did not speak directly to Thomas about this.

What happened next seemed to reinforce the “Share is going away without a replacement” view. Mark Heath, who is VP of Product Development at Alfresco, said something like, “We want to be a platform company. We do not want to develop applications. We want to be the platform and let you guys develop applications.” Again, I am paraphrasing and was unable to find Heath to get a clarification, but discussions with employees indicate that’s pretty clearly how he feels.

So the messaging around the future of Share continues to be a bit of a mess. What we do know is that Share will go away some day, but we don’t know when. It could be years. What we also don’t know is what, if anything, will take its place.

What Might Happen Next

When Alfresco introduced Share, there was already a web client called Explorer. Just like Share, many customers had extended and customized Explorer. To help those clients, Alfresco kept both clients around for a long time until we eventually bid Explorer goodbye. There is no reason to think Alfresco will behave any differently this time around.

I realize Alfresco wants to be a platform company. But that doesn’t mean it can provide only a library of components and a couple of example applications unless it wants to radically alienate its existing customer base and go after a completely different market than it does now. Maybe that will be what happens over many years, but I don’t see it happening abruptly. So there will have to be some sort of Share replacement, even if Thomas doesn’t want to call it that and despite the fact that developing and supporting applications may not be ideal for a platform company.

Can you imagine implementing Alfresco for a customer and then saying, “Okay, everything is installed and working great. But before you can actually use it for anything, you’ll need to use these components to assemble an application that does what you want.” It would be like buying a car, except it only comes as a chassis, an engine, and four tires.

Alfresco points out that they are already providing at least two example applications built with the ADF. Those are helpful for developers, but a short time-to-value demands that a production-ready, supported, configurable, and extensible client be made available to customers out-of-the-box.

I suspect Alfresco will realize this and will ultimately provide it. If the past is prolog, the current “Example Content App” might evolve to be that thing.

If that does not happen, one or more of the following will happen:

  • Customers will cling to Alfresco Share for as long as possible and may ultimately delay its deprecation by threatening to not renew their support subscription unless Share support is continued.
  • Partners will start developing competing front-ends (funded by their clients). Of course alternative front-ends already exist, but you’ll see this increase, big-time.
  • The community might step up and organize around a true open source project that aims to approximate Alfresco Share, either with ADF or with their own components. I floated this idea on Twitter during the conference and it sparked a lot of discussion.
  • The Alfresco Share code base could fork. If Alfresco decides to end support for Alfresco Share before customers are ready, which I find highly unlikely, people who need it could carry it forward. A slight variation on this would be if Alfresco volunteered to make Share a community project as they’ve done with other products for which they’ve dropped support.
  • Customers could decide to migrate to some other vendor’s product.

There are many customers who don’t use Share at all. I suspect some within Alfresco believe that because many of their biggest clients don’t use Share anyway it wouldn’t be a big deal to sunset it without a replacement. I’m hoping that there’s a stronger contingent that realizes it’s not that simple and that there are a variety of customers using the platform. Alfresco can’t afford to walk away from customers who can’t or don’t want to develop and support their own custom apps for simple document management or light collaboration use cases.

The bottom line is that you should not count on Alfresco Share being around forever. This will take years to unfold, but we should all wrap our heads around that fact now and plan accordingly.

Photo Credit: Mark Gunn, CC by 2.0

Alfresco Software resurrects DevCon

Encouraged by the success of the independently-organized, developer-focused BeeCon conference, and seeking to continue its renewed focus on developers, Alfresco has decided to resurrect its own annual developer-focused event. This week Alfresco announced that DevCon will be held January 16 – 18 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Alfresco had previously given up on big, annual events, deciding instead to focus on smaller, one day events in local markets around the globe. These were primarily sales and marketing events focused on lead generation and did not include an open call for papers.

When the annual events were discontinued, the community stepped in. The Order of the Bee, a global community of Alfresco enthusiasts independent of Alfresco Software, Inc., held two successful conferences in 2016 and 2017. These were low-budget, non-profit affairs with a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

Despite being organized independently by the community, the Order of the Bee events were still heavily supported by Alfresco. The company paid for high-level sponsorships and sent many engineers, John Newton, and other staff to give talks at both Order of the Bee conferences.

The company’s interest in annual events isn’t the only thing to have come back around lately. In the early days, the company was very focused on developers. The repository was pitched as a key foundational technology to content-centric applications. Over time that focus blurred as the company tried to move up-market towards “solutions” and the marketing focus turned to business buyers. But the pendulum has swung back again, centered mainly around the Alfresco Development Framework, a set of components meant to make it easier for developers to build content and process centric applications. So it is no surprise that Alfresco would be interested in being the primary driver behind an annual developer-centric event.

The resurrection of DevCon by Alfresco should be good for the community as long as the event is able to hold on to its community and developer focus. They have invited The Order of the Bee to help with conference planning, so that will help. And, the community and developer outreach functions within Alfresco are now held by many former community members so that also increases its chance of success, at least from a community perspective.

The Alfresco community has always been strongest in Europe. For now, Lisbon is the only date announced. If it is successful, it’s possible we could see a North American date later in 2018, or perhaps they will alternate continents every other year.

The Call for Papers is open now. But if you want to speak, you’d better hurry. The deadline for submissions is Monday, October 23, 2017.

Join me in Spain for BeeCon, the community-organized Alfresco conference

Registration for BeeCon 2017 is now open. What is BeeCon? It’s a conference focused on Alfresco organized by The Order of the Bee, a grassroots community of Alfresco enthusiasts.

This year the conference is April 25 – 28. We’ll be in Zaragoza, Spain, a beautiful city about 1.5 hours by train from Madrid.

If you’ve ever been to Alfresco DevCon, the conference is a lot like that. The focus is on providing high-quality content free of sales pitches.

Despite being run by volunteers with costs kept to a minimum (it essentially runs as a non-profit), last year’s conference was well-attended and felt very professional and well-planned. I have no doubt that the hard work of the conference committee and the support of our sponsors will result in another proud moment for The Order of the Bee and, more importantly, a productive use of your time.

This year the format changed slightly. We moved the hack-a-thon to the beginning of the conference so it would not conflict with sessions. That night we’ll have a welcome party. Sessions start the next morning. The conference features two and-a-half days of traditional sessions, which are mostly technical, as well as lightning talks, which are always entertaining and informative. The schedule is on the conference site.

BeeCon is planned, organized, and executed entirely by volunteers. Alfresco Software, Inc. and other vendors pay to sponsor the event, but the program is driven by a committee of Order of the Bee members. Speaker selection is based on the merit of the proposal. Do you have an Alfresco story to share? Become a speaker!

For me, BeeCon is a time to lift my head up from my projects and spend time learning what others are doing in this space. It also gives me a chance to physically hang out, chat, and laugh with people I collaborate with online nearly every day. This year, I hope you’ll decide to join us in person. I am looking forward to seeing you in Zaragoza!

Alfresco cancels Summit, asks community to organize its own conference

summit-community-editionEarlier this week, in a post to a public mailing list, Ole Hejlskov, Developer Evangelist at Alfresco, announced that the company will not be putting on its annual conference, Alfresco Summit, this year as originally planned. Instead, the company is focusing on smaller, shorter, sales-oriented events which have been very successful in several cities around the globe.

Ole said that Alfresco will be adding developer content to its Alfresco Day events, which have historically been mostly end-user and decision-maker focused. In contrast, Alfresco’s yearly events started out as developer-focused conferences, but in recent years had a more balanced agenda with both technical and non-technical tracks.

Alfresco had announced earlier in the year that their annual conference would be in New Orleans in November. In each of the last five years the company put on two conferences–one in Europe and the other in United States. For 2015 the plan was to have a single conference only in the U.S. which drew criticism from the community that skews heavily toward a non-U.S. demographic.

When the community realized Alfresco Summit 2015 would be held only in the U.S., an independent community organization called The Order of the Bee began making plans to hold their own conference in Europe. Alfresco says it will support the community’s efforts to hold its own event and wants to explore “…ways in which participation from Alfresco corporate makes sense”.

I understand where Alfresco is coming from. Annual conferences are expensive in both real dollars and the time and attention it takes to plan and execute. When you multiply that times two it obviously represents an even bigger investment.

You also have to look at what Alfresco gets out of the conference. Alfresco is increasingly sales-focused. The conference has historically been focused on knowledge-sharing and camaraderie. Yes, there were deals closed at Alfresco Summit but it was not geared towards selling. It was more about coming together to share stories, good and bad.

The Alfresco Day events are unabashedly sales and marketing. The attendees (and they get very large turnouts) know this which means Alfresco does not have to apologize for coming off too sales-y. Multiple cities with hundreds of prospects is a better investment for them than two cities with 1400 attendees who are existing customers and community members.

As the guy who led DevCon and Alfresco Summit and together with my team grew it year after year, it is weird to see Alfresco cancel the conference for 2015. I was looking forward to attending.

As a member of The Order of the Bee, I’m intrigued by the challenge of using an all-volunteer organization to potentially put together a replacement conference of some sort. If you have any interest in helping and you did not see my email to the mailing list, we’ll probably be meeting next week to get organized. Reach out to me and I’ll add you to the invitation.

Alfresco DevCon evolves to incorporate business tracks; will be known as Alfresco Summit in 2013

We have done six Alfresco DevCon events so far–one in EMEA and one in the Americas for each of the last three years. The general feeling from people who have attended is that it has improved year after year. Attendees come from all over the globe and are usually a good mix of Enterprise Edition users, Community Edition users, partners, Alfresco employees, and other community members.

Each year we try to do something new to make the event better. Last year we added things like the DevCon web site, Lightning Talks, the Hack-a-Thon, and recordings of each session. These were all hugely popular, but they were all relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. This year, we’re going to shake things up a bit and I wanted to share our plans with you first.

There’s something that’s been bothering us about DevCon: The event isn’t inclusive of our entire community. We want an annual conference to be the go-to event for everyone in the ecosystem, not just developers. Shouldn’t it be possible to have one event with content that is laser focused on each audience?

We think so.

So this year, we are expanding DevCon into what we hope will be a must-attend event for anyone working on an Alfresco project, regardless of their job title. The first change you’ll notice is the name. We’re going to call it Alfresco Summit.

New name, same great technical content, and then some

So the name changes. What else? First, content. Alfresco Summit will include the same great DevCon tracks that you are used to plus a whole new set of non-technical content aimed at the business end of Enterprise Content Management. What might you find in such a business track? Things like non-technical customer case studies, panel discussions with industry analysts, best practices around compliance, going paperless, or case management. Basically, talks that help you be successful in your implementation that focus on everything but code and configuration.

The next change you’ll notice is that we’re adding a half-day to the event. We’ll still have the optional training day, but we want to have some room in the agenda for some high profile speakers, product demos, and other types of general sessions. In addition, the extra time gives us more opportunity to have repeats of popular sessions to help alleviate inevitable schedule conflicts.

Finally, you may notice a bit more production value or “sizzle” to the event. It’s hard to quantify what that really means. Really this is about putting on an event that appears to you, the attendee, as if it were that of a company 100 times our size in terms of organization, branding, quality, and execution.

Help me spread the DevCon magic to our non-technical brothers and sisters

I continue to chair the event. If you’ve enjoyed DevCon the last two years, this should be good news to you. (If you haven’t enjoyed it, make sure I’ve heard your feedback so I can try to make it better). I will also own the DevCon tracks so we’ll have the same high bar for technical content we’ve had in the past. I will work to keep the things that you love about DevCon (the content, the access to engineers, the fun) in place as we expand to an event the entire community can enjoy.

The general format of the conference stays the same:

  • Day 0: An optional day for training, hack-a-thon, and partner meetings.
  • Day 1: The first day of the main conference starts out with some general sessions and then moves to breakouts with a fun party that night.
  • Day 2: Another full day, again starting with some general sessions and product demos before moving to breakouts. Another party that night (this is new).
  • Day 3: New for 2013, this is a half-day of breakouts with a closing panel of Engineering leads and senior management.

Of course, we’ll have the exhibition hall, engineering office hours, lightning talks, purposeful lunches, etc.

Where and When?

The save-the-date will be coming soon. The timing will be similar to last year (November) for both EMEA and Americas. EMEA should be thinking southern Europe and we’ll be on the East Coast of the US for the Americas.

Here’s what I need from you:

  • In last year’s DevCon survey, we asked if there were people who would attend if we had a business track. Roughly half of you said yes. I need you to show up this year with those people at your side.
  • Consider speaking. Especially if you are a current customer. Business or technical track, it doesn’t matter. The key is that the community wants to hear what you’re doing with Alfresco. This is the best place to share your story. The call for papers will be open by the end of April. Watch this blog, twitter, etc. for more info on that.
  • Tell me what kind of content you’d like to see at Alfresco Summit. A good way to do that is to propose session titles. You can do that here in the comments for now. If enough people have enough feedback we can look at doing something fancier.
  • If you haven’t attended in the past, make this the year you find a way to get to the conference. This is the quintessential gathering of the Alfresco community. You won’t want to miss it.

You can trust me to not screw up a good thing, but I need your help to make it awesome. If you have thoughts or comments as we continue to evolve our annual conference, share those here or by emailing me directly at jeff dot potts at alfresco dot com.

DevCon Hack-a-Thon & Activiti Day

Just a quick note about recent DevCon goings-on in case you’ve missed this via other channels…

Early-Bird Registration Ends 10 September!

Just a friendly reminder: You can save some money if you sign up before 10 September, so do not wait to sign-up.

DevCon 2012 Promo Video

Includes a few quotes from the Alfresco community’s colorful cast of characters.

DevCon 2012 Hack-a-Thon

We’re going to be doing a Hack-a-Thon the day before the main conference starts in both Berlin and San Jose. This will run concurrently with the optional Fundamentals and Advanced Training classes. So if you are an Alfresco old-timer who doesn’t need Fundamentals or Advanced training, show up a day early and join us in the hack-a-thon. We’re still deciding which projects we’re going to work on that day. More info will be posted on the DevCon Hack-a-Thon page as it develops.

Activiti Day Berlin

If you are attending DevCon Berlin and you have any interest in Activiti, you should plan on staying an extra day and joining us for an Activiti Community reception the night of 7 November and then an all day Activiti Community event on 8 November. See the DevCon blog for more details.

DevCon Lightning Talks Debut

We’re planning on having two lightning talk sessions, one on each day of the main conference, at both DevCon events this year. We are planning on using the Ignite format, but if that is holding a significant number of people back, we may decide to relax that requirement. If you want to give a 5-minute talk at DevCon, sign up now.

How to suggest or propose a DevCon 2012 talk

If you want to give a talk at DevCon, here are your options:

  • Read the call for papers, then submit a proposal for a traditional session no later than May 19
  • Come to the conference and sign up for a Lightning Talk
  • Come to the conference and participate in a Birds-of-a-Feather session

If you have an idea for a session but you don’t want to speak, reply to this thread in the forums with your idea and maybe it will inspire someone else to give the talk.

Alfresco DevCon 2012: San Jose & Berlin

Last week I announced that Alfresco DevCon 2012 will be in Berlin and San Jose. We’ll be at the Berlin Hilton November 5, 6, & 7 and at the San Jose Marriott & Convention Center November 13, 14, & 15. Eagle-eyed readers who saw the announcement last week will note that the Berlin date has changed. The DMS Expo conference in Stuttgart conflicted with our dates so we’re moving to give everyone the maximum opportunity to Experience DevCon Awesomeness.

In both cities, the first day of the conference is an optional training day. We’re still working out exactly which classes will be offered on the training day, but we are increasing capacity this year due to popular demand.

Like last year, the main conference days will feature keynotes from Alfresco leadership, some great sessions from Alfresco Engineers, partners, and other members of the community, and plenty of opportunities for networking.

I’m finalizing tracks right now. As soon as I’m done, I’ll post the call for papers. I expect you to unleash a flood of outstanding conference submissions.

If you need some inspiration, take a look at the DevCon 2011 presentations on slideshare.

I typically post DevCon related news here but you might also want to follow the DevCon blog as well.