Tag: 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!

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.

http://youtu.be/-bL1wZ1k22k

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.

Alfresco News Recap: DevCon, Survey, Dashlets, & a Forums Milestone

The news in the Alfresco world is happening faster than my sluggish blogging pace can keep up with, so I am forced to write a “recap” style post to keep you informed. It won’t win a Peabody, but at least you’ll be in the know…

Alfresco DevCon Registration Goes Live

Alfresco DevCon registration has been live for a little over a week. This year, we have a cool site just for DevCon that includes the full agenda, travel info, speaker bios, and a sponsor listing. Early-bird registration ends September 10 for both Berlin and San Jose. We’re on a pretty good pace right now with registrations so I would not wait around to secure your spot.

Alfresco Community Survey

The survey ended a couple of months ago. Honestly, we had a disappointing response rate compared to last year. Still, there was some good feedback provided. I’m responding to many of you to get you to elaborate further on your suggestions or to respond to specific questions. I’m about halfway through my follow-up list. Last year, I published the survey results and I’ll do that again this year before too long.

Alfresco Dashlet Challenge

The Alfresco Dashlet Challenge has just kicked off. This is a developer-focused contest in which people try to see who can create the coolest Add-Ons for Alfresco Share. You could win one of three Android tablets and a free DevCon pass if you can edge out the stiff competition. My blog post on socialcontent.com talks about some of last year’s submissions and includes a link to the full terms and conditions. My fellow American citizens were a big no-show in last year’s Dashlet Challenge, so I’m hoping to see that corrected this year!

Mark Rogers Makes His 4,000th Post

If you’ve spent any time in the Alfresco Forums, odds are you’ve come across Mark. He’s been a dedicated soul, working tirelessly to answer questions on just about every topic imaginable, since 2008. He’s routinely in the top 1 or 2 users in terms of volume in any given month. What’s great about Mark, though, is not just that he’s prolific–he’s also helpful. The guy has racked up 287 points, which is second only to Mike Hatfield. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of Mark’s. Well, last month, Mark made his 4000th post in the Alfresco Forums. 4000 posts! Just to give you some perspective, that’s about 1.5 times higher than the person with the 3rd highest number of posts (Kevin Roast). Of course everyone who spends significant amount of time in the forums on their own time deserves kudos, but when you see Mark at DevCon (or run into him in the forums) please congratulate him on this milestone.

While I’m on the topic of forums, we did pretty good on cutting down on unanswered posts in February, March, and April. Those months had some of the lowest number of unanswered topics as a percentage of topics created. But now we’re creeping back up to our old numbers. If you get a chance, maybe you could spend an extra 30 minutes in the forums this week. If everyone did an extra post a week (which is about 1/30th of Mark’s pace!) it would really help out.

Alfresco Community Pledges & other things that worked well at DevCon

I had so much fun putting on Alfresco DevCon last week in San Diego. You can read my short wrap-up on the Alfresco DevCon Blog. Claudia Saleh also provides Day 1 Re-Cap and Day 2 Re-Cap posts as well. And Claudia took a lot of great pics at the event and put them on Flickr. After London we’ll get all of the presentations from both events on SlideShare for everyone to enjoy.

We tried a lot of new things at DevCon last week. I thought I’d re-cap what worked well here:

Purposeful lunches. DevCon was two days. On Day 1, we assigned a technical topic to each lunch table and then made sure an Engineer was at each table to cover that topic. Attendees sorted themselves to the table they were interested in discussing over lunch. Some tables really worked their topic over thoroughly during lunch. Others used it as an icebreaker and then moved on to other stuff. On Day 2 we divided the tables up by geography and industry vertical. Most people I talked to liked the concept.

Engineering Office Hours. The concept is a repeat from our first DevCon, but this year we had a bulletin board with each Engineer, their bio, their picture, and a sign-up sheet. Attendees grabbed a slot, then met with their Engineer. This worked out really well. For London we’ll pre-print the time slots rather than have them be freeform.

Panel Discussion. Last year at DevCon in New York, the panel discussion was a little ad hoc. This year we put the panel discussion on the morning of the second day as a general session and that seemed to work. For London, we’re moving the panel discussion to the end of the second day so any questions that the day 2 sessions raise can be asked at that time. It should also give us a nice opportunity to recap the conference.

Alfresco Community Pledges. DevCon serves a lot of purposes. One is to energize and motivate people to get involved with the Alfresco community. I had some extra Alfresco “attitude” t-shirts so I decided to give them to people who would pledge to make some contribution to the community in the coming weeks and months. Here are some that we got via twitter.

@dev_kraig Kraig Van Houten
@Alfresco I #pledge to write one #alfresco related blog post per month

@SunilRehman Sunil Rehman
@Alfresco I #pledge to report 5 new #Alfresco 4.0 b bugs before thanksgiving

@WillWhite18 Will White
I #pledge to report at least 5 bugs in #Alfresco 4.0b before thanksgiving.

@Michaelcford Michael C Ford
@Alfresco I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum post in the next 3 weeks

@emmichie Eric Michie
I #pledge to host an #Alfresco meetup in my area twice this quarter. Salt Lake City Utah

@tenthline_ecm Tenthline
@tenthline_ecm will #pledge to host #Alfresco meetup in #Toronto twice this quarter.

@aaronaheath Aaron Heath
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month for the next 12 months. I will also become more active on the #Alfresco forum.

@perejnar Per Ejnar Thomsen
I #pledge to report 5 new (legitimate) #Alfresco 4.0b bugs before Thanksgiving

@dstaflund Darryl Stafflund
I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum posts in the next three Weeks.

@iancrew Ian Crew
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

@trisofer Chris Paul
@jeffpotts01 I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

It was great to see these and to talk to people between sessions who said the conference was the kick in the pants they needed to get going again with their contributions.

Thanks to everyone who attended, sponsored, or spoke at DevCon San Diego. It exceeded my expectations and hopefully yours as well. I’ll report back here after London and we’ll see if these ideas were just as successful for that event.

Alfresco DevCon 2011 session list has been posted

I’ve finally finalized the list of sessions for Alfresco DevCon Americas in San Diego and Alfresco DevCon EMEA in London. Have a gander. I’m sure I’ll be running around like a wild man those two days, but if I get to see some sessions, I think I’m going to be hard-pressed to choose which ones to go to.

My next step is to put those sessions in date-time and room slots. To fix the schedule, basically. It’s an interesting Sudoku-like exercise. You don’t want to have overlapping tracks for a given time slot, you can’t have overlapping speakers for a given time slot, there’s a bit of a logical progression between some sessions, and you want to try to avoid scheduling extremely hot sessions for the same time slot.

The last one is the really tough one. I can pick my favorites but those won’t necessarily reflect the group’s favorites. If all of my rooms were the same size it wouldn’t matter, but they aren’t. In each city we’ve got one big breakout room and two smaller ones.

To get some handle on how well attended some of these might be I’ve created a very short survey. The survey is basically, “Which city are you attending” and “Pick your favorite sessions from this long list”. If you are planning on attending and you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate it if you’d review the list of sessions for your DevCon city, then take the survey.

Even with this survey the schedule won’t be perfect. Apologies ahead of time if you have to make a tough choice.

Alfresco DevCon coming to San Diego and London this Fall

We’ve finally got everything settled around the cities, venues, and dates for our annual Alfresco DevCon. This year we will be in San Diego at the Hard Rock Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter October 26th & 27th and in London at Prospero House in Central London November 9th & 10th.

In both cities, the two conference days will be preceded by a Training Day. So, if you want to take the Jump Start or Advanced training courses and attend the full conference, you’ll need to block out three days. If you are skipping Training Day, you’ll need to block out two days.

My official announcement is on the DevCon blog, here. You should get in the habit of following that blog for all DevCon related news. I’ll try to point you to additional posts on that blog as they happen, but that feels kind of redundant.

We’ll get registration turned on soon. And we’ll be sharing additional info around hotel and travel, so watch that blog.