Tag: Open Source

Alfresco-Drupal integration through CMIS

As I’ve mentioned here and on twitter, we posted our Alfresco-Drupal integration on Drupal.org on Friday. I did a short write-up on it over at Optaros.com that gives the why and the what so I’ll not repeat it here.

We split the integration into two modules: CMIS API has nothing Alfresco-specific–it just knows how to make RESTful CMIS calls to an arbitrary CMIS repository. The Alfresco CMIS module has the Alfresco-specific logic. You need both to make the integration work. If you’ve got Alfresco 3 (Enterprise or Labs) you don’t need to do anything to your Alfresco install to enable the integration because it’s already CMIS compliant.

There is still a lot of work to do on this integration. For example, right now we’re only moving plain text content back-and-forth between Drupal and Alfresco. And we use a “single account” approach so that to Alfresco, every request appears to come from one user instead of passing through the authenticated Drupal credentials. But this is an imporant integration to us so I expect it to evolve substantially in the coming months.

I got good feedback on the recent screencasts I put together for Share (Part 1, Part 2) so if I get some time this week I’ll do one that gives a quick tour of the Drupal integration.

New Django-Solr open source project

Fellow Optarian Sean Creeley has released a Django-Solr integration as an open source project hosted at Google Code. Django is a Python-based web framework. Apache Solr is essentially an XML and JSON API that sits on top of Apache Lucene.

Sean’s also working on our Django-Alfresco integration. I’m not sure how this project jumped in front of that one. Guess I need to take Sean out for a beer and see if I can’t influence the roadmap a bit. (Half-kidding).

If you want to see the Django-Solr stuff in action, take a look at Sean’s blog. It’s built using Django and he’s got a live example that shows the Solr integration in action.

You can expect several new Optaros-sponsored open source projects to become available throughout the year so stay tuned.

Alfresco Surf 3.0 Code Camp NYC in the bag

What a great group of campers we had today at the Alfresco 3.0 Surf Camp in New York City. We were all quite impressed with how much the attendees were able to get accomplished.

It’s clear that experience with web scripts sets one up for success with Surf. Surf is a two-tier framework. The repository tier is exposed to the presentation or Surf tier through web scripts running on the repository. So, obviously experience writing repository tier web scripts is directly applicable. On the presentation tier, it is still MVC and web scripts, but Surf adds page definition and templating constructs. The biggest challenge for people already familiar with web scripts, then, is to learn the presentation tier lingo and to sort out the numerous XML files, what they do, where they go, etc.

The best way to learn Surf seems to be to start with a simple Share dashlet then work up to building a complete web site. The dashlet gives you a chance to practice with the Surf JavaScript API and to make remote calls to the Alfresco repository (or other HTTP end points). Once you get the hang of that, try to build a simple one page web site that maybe queries some data from the repository and formats the results. Then, broaden from there.

Anyway, thanks to everyone that attended or helped put this together.

Surfing in D.C. with Alfresco’s new web application framework

If you are in Washington, D.C. today for Alfresco’s North American Community Conference please be sure to stop me and say hello. I’ll be in the sessions, in the Optaros booth, and presenting during the technical track. For my European friends, I’m sad to say that I will not be in Munich for the European version of the conference next week, but I will be in Europe at the end of this year or the first part of January so we can meet up then.

During the technical track (in both D.C and Munich) we will be showing some Surf 3.0 components we’ve built. One is called “Status”. It is kind of like a Facebook status or a Basecamp Journal entry. It allows you to say what you’re working on right now and what your mood is. A dashlet aggregates the status entries for all of your teammates across the site and another one shows status across all sites to which you are a member. When you mark it “Done” that status is archived. When status changes are made the new Activity Service is called so that if people are following site activity by subscribing to the activity feed, the status changes are included.

We’ve also got a simple “bookmark” component that lets you share URLs with other team members. As it exists right this second it allows a team to manage a set of shared bookmarks. Before it is GA we plan to make sure bookmarks are taggable and rateable and marked as shared or private.

I’ll follow up soon with a deconstruction of these components so you can learn more about how they work (and even contribute code to them if you want to make improvements).

Finally, we plan to leverage the Rating Service that was used as an example in the forthcoming Alfresco Developer Guide as the back-end for a five star rating component that would allow any Share or Surf site to enable users to rate any node.

These components will be available for you to add to your Share sites or any site built with Alfresco Surf. Our goal is to have them generally available by the time 3.0 Enterprise ships.

We’ll also be hosting code camps in North America and Europe so that you can learn to build your own Surf components. I’ll provide more details on those as they are available.

Alfresco pledges to open community by 3.0

At the Alfresco Community Conference in San Jose Wednesday, Kevin Cochrane and John Newton promised to have a process in place to let non-Alfresco employees become committers to the Alfresco Community code line. The pledge, which many in the community may find surprising because up until this point, Alfresco has operated as a “closed community”, came in response to my question during the “Ask an Expert” session about the possibility of opening up. Kevin responded, “It’s coming with 3.0”, to which John added, “We want to make it easier for developers in the community to contribute to the product. We want to remove the bureaucracy that’s there. The more the merrier.”

Committers will have to assign over copyright and make guarantees that the code they contribute is theirs to give. According to John, this assignment of rights may be difficult for developers working for certain types of organizations, particularly those in government agencies, but Alfresco is working on a solution.