Category: Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Web Content Management (WCM), Document Management (DM). Whatever you call it this category covers market happenings and lessons learned.

September 28, 2017

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.

September 25, 2017

Secure your Alfresco server

One of the services that Metaversant provides is called a Health Check, which is exactly like it sounds: We review clients’ Alfresco installations from bottom to top and make recommendations for improvement.

A surprisingly large number of those assessments consistently show that people are not doing enough to secure their environment. In the past, I might have added, “especially for those with an externally-facing server” but, honestly, at this point, you really ought to be treating the entire network as an untrusted, hostile environment, even if it is behind a firewall.

First, let’s start with the bare minimum. These will be obvious to many of you, but believe me, they are not universally applied.

Change the default admin password to a random string

Most everyone changes the admin password, but many people make poor choices as to what that password is. Do what you should be doing with your personal passwords: Change the admin password to a randomized string.

Once you change it, don’t share it in clear-text email or text messages. Use PGP to encrypt emails that include secrets. If you must use a mobile device to share secrets use Signal.

Secure your server traffic with HTTPS

If you aren’t going to encrypt the traffic to your server then you might as well skip all of the advice in this entire post and treat your repository as public information. If that sounds like a bad idea, then you must encrypt your traffic to prevent passwords from being exposed in clear text.

The wonderful service, Let’s Encrypt, makes quality SSL certificates available to everyone for free. Yes, you have to renew them more often than paid certificates but you can automate that fairly easily with EFF’s certbot. In fact, once you establish the web proxy in front of Tomcat, securing your traffic with Let’s Encrypt is as easy as running the certbot script if you have a public-facing server.

Do not run Alfresco as root

If someone does compromise Alfresco you want to limit the damage they can do. If Alfresco is running as root, they can wreck havoc on your server.

I often see Alfresco running as root on installations where someone has simply stood up a server, switched to root, and then run the installer. When you install as root, the Alfresco service will be set up to run as root. If you later try to run as a non-root user, the alfresco.sh script might complain. You can fix this by editing the script. But you can avoid the problem altogether by installing as a non-root user in the first place.

Sometimes Alfresco will be set up to run as a non-root user and then someone will unknowingly start the server as root. When this happens you have to stop the server, recursively fix all of the permissions on the files that root touched, and then restart as the non-root user.

Disable unused protocols

This one is about reducing your attack surface. One of the nice things about Alfresco is the wide number of options you have for getting information in and out of the repository. That’s great, but if you aren’t using, for example, FTP, then why leave FTP enabled? That’s a potential place an attacker could find a toehold. Purposefully review each of the protocols that Alfresco supports and disable those that are not being used.

Re-generate the Solr certificate

Alfresco and Solr are separate web applications. Regardless of whether or not these web apps are running in the same Tomcat server, different Tomcat servers, or even different machines, they use HTTP to communicate with each other. The communication between Solr and Alfresco is encrypted, by default. The Solr web application is secured using certificate-based client authentication. But, by default, the certificate Solr uses for both encryption and authentication is the one that Alfresco generated and shipped with the product. This means that, by default, if someone can get to your Solr port they can search your entire repository because the public has easy access to that Alfresco-generated, default client certificate.

To fix this, either make sure no one can hit the Solr port (8443, by default) or re-generate the certificate. Or both. For more info on how to re-generate the Solr certificate, see the docs.

Stay current

I see an alarmingly high number of people running ancient versions of Alfresco. Often this is because the effort to upgrade can be fairly intense, especially if there are a lot of customizations to deal with. Like any significant piece of software, there have been a number of vulnerabilities discovered and resolved in Alfresco over the years. Staying on an old release could put your installation at risk.

Those are certainly the most common security issues I come across. I would consider these to be the minimum set of best practices.

Recently, I’ve had an increase in the number of clients asking about adding Two-Factor Authentication to Alfresco Share. There are a few options for doing this:

Loftux offers a module that implements two-factor authentication using Authy. There is a cost associated both with the Loftux add-on and the Authy service.
Contezza offers an add-on that uses Google Authenticator. In this case, the add-on has a cost but Google Authenticator is free. Google Authenticator may not be the right choice for everyone, though.
There are also community projects that have done some work in this area, including a very old add-on that works with Yubikeys. Yubikeys are pretty cool, but the obvious drawback is that you have to distribute and manage the physical keys to your users.

Finally, no discussion of Alfresco and security would be complete without mentioning my friend and former colleague, Toni Blyx. The guy knows his stuff. His “Security Best Practices” presentation from Alfresco Summit 2014 is an important read.

Photo Credit: “Vintage Bank Vault” by Brook Ward, CC BY-NC 2.0

September 1, 2017

Apache Chemistry cmislib 0.6.0 released

It has been far too long since our last Apache Chemistry cmislib release, but we finally managed to get one out. The new release, 0.6.0, features support for the browser binding as well as many fixes contributed by the community.

If you make no changes to your code the library will continue to use the Atom Pub binding, by default. But, the browser binding, which communicates with CMIS 1.1-compliant repositories using HTML forms and JSON, is often preferable because it may be more performant than the XML-based Atom Pub binding.

To use the new browser binding, import it, then pass it to the CmisClient constructor, like this:

from cmislib.browser.binding import BrowserBinding
client = CmisClient('http://localhost:8081/chemistry/browser',
   'admin',
   'admin',
   binding=BrowserBinding())

From there everything works like it always has.

For more information, please see the docs. If you have issues, please file a Jira with as much detail as possible, including the vendor and version of the repository you are working with. And if you have a fix, include that in your Jira. Contributions are welcome!

July 10, 2017

Storj.io: An open source, massively distributed object store and API for developers

I’ve been playing with a new object storage solution that’s kind of cool. It’s called Storj. Before I describe how it works, let me start by comparing it to a more familiar solution.

Probably the best-known example of object storage is Amazon S3. It allows you to define buckets and then upload files into those buckets. Amazon charges you based on the amount you store and the amount you transfer, plus a little based on the total number of objects stored. There are three tiers of storage based on frequency of access and pricing varies by region, but for discussion purposes let’s say it is about $0.023 per GB per month. To store 500 GB that would cost about $138 per year without transfer fees.

For that $138 you can be sure that Amazon is replicating your data across multiple facilities and devices. Amazon says that S3 offers 99.999999999% durability. That’s pretty impressive.

But one consideration with using S3 or any other traditional cloud storage solution is that your data is sitting in data centers owned by a single vendor. Of course you could take steps to replicate that data to other providers, but that is kind of a pain. Even then you will still end up with your data sitting behind a relatively small number of vendors, none of whom are really geared toward transparency and openness.

Storj.io was built to address this problem. It’s an open source, distributed object storage platform. Like S3, the model consists of buckets and files in those buckets. The difference is in how your data is stored. When you upload a file to Storj, your file is broken into small pieces called shards, encrypted using keys you hold, and then uploaded to several nodes around the world.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. The nodes that store data are not owned by a single entity. Instead, nodes are run by “storage farmers”. Disk farming is kind of like crypto currency farming, but instead of solving mathematical computations to earn crypto coins, farmers receive micro payments based on how much their space gets utilized. Storj actually leverages the Ethereum blockchain to make this work, and if you are interested in the nitty gritty details, you should check out the whitepaper.

A farmer might be an individual with 50 GB of spare disk space or it could be an organization with lots and lots of space. You don’t know and you don’t really care. Their space gets selected based on a number of factors, which includes things like stability of the node, bandwidth, and total space available. If a farmer tries to tamper with any data on their node they get dropped and they don’t get paid.

Right now Storj is offering 25 GB of free space for one year. After that, their current pricing is $.015 per GB per month. So using my 500 GB example, that’s $90 per year without transfer fees. And if you have some extra storage sitting around, you could become a farmer and offset your costs a little bit.

To be clear, Storj is a tool for developers. After signing up you’ll get presented with a GUI for creating buckets, but when it’s time to start moving data into those buckets you’ll need the API. Right now there is a NodeJS library or you can use a command-line tool provided by a native installer.

This service definitely looks promising, but it is important to know that it is still early. One thing to think about is what happens if farmers start dropping out of the network. When your file is split into shards, each shard is copied to multiple nodes. In my quick test, shards were spread across five nodes, which is plenty to give me confidence that I will be able to get my file back.

If a node drops offline, it is supposed to trigger a replication of your shard to another farmer using one of the remaining good nodes. This works great unless all of the farmers who hold one of your shards drop at once, but with 19,000 farmers and climbing, and assuming your shards are always on multiple nodes, the chances of that happening seem very, very low. The docs say that Storj is working on rolling out additional mirroring strategies. And, you can always use the API to ask Storj which nodes your file is sharded across. It looks like you can make an API call to move a shard yourself, but I haven’t tried that yet.

One last thing to point out is that this is an open source project. You are welcome to contribute. You can even grab the software and run a completely private Storj network, if you want.

I feel like some of my clients are still getting used to the idea of putting their data in the cloud. And some like one throat to choke. A distributed cloud like this may be a tougher sell for conservative customers, even if the security and the durability are there. Still, I love the concept. What do you think?

May 8, 2017

Thoughts on BeeCon 2017, the community-organized conference for Alfresco enthusiasts

At the end of April a couple hundred Alfresco enthusiasts met in Zaragoza, Spain, for the second annual BeeCon. BeeCon is a conference organized by and for the Alfresco community. Attendees represented every continent except Antarctica (and Boriss, who is Chilean, tried to claim that he also represents Antarctica). I was truly impressed with the broad attendance, especially with those that came from as far away as China and Australia to collaborate, learn, and teach together with the rest of the Alfresco community.

Here are some thoughts I had during the conference…

Where are the North Americans, especially U.S.-based partners?

We increased our attendance by North Americans this year from almost no one to a small handful of the usuals plus a few new delegates, including some from the University of Alberta. The Alfresco community has always been stronger in Europe than in North America for whatever reason, but I’d like to see us significantly improve attendance from North America.

Key to that is partner participation. A formal partner should be setting the example for contributing to the community. This is not simply altruism–a company can help the community and by doing so add top-spin to the value of their partnership. European partners clearly get that. One European partner had 8 or 9 people at the conference. Zia and Micro Strategies did make it. But most North American partners seem to only be interested in selling and marketing events, which is a real shame.

Alfresco is clearly focused on Cloud and ADF

It is clear that the big focus for Alfresco is on two areas: Cloud and the ADF (Application Development Framework).

For cloud, work is under way to essentially develop a cloud-native content repository and associated services. This is more than just spinning up some virtual machines on AWS, Google, or Azure and running Alfresco as we know it. This would leverage the services those platforms provide in a native way to provide content services. Examples include things like using S3 for storage, Dynamo for metadata, and lambdas for things like actions and behaviors. Alfresco is focusing first on AWS, then they’ll look at other cloud providers.

The ADF is the other area of focus. It is often referred to in the same breath as “Angular components” but it is more than just a set of components for that specific client-side framework. The ADF also includes a more general client-side JavaScript library, so if Angular is not your thing, you can still leverage the client-side JavaScript library from your framework of choice. The ADF also includes some project bootstrapping in the form of a Yeoman generator.

There were also several talks on the server-side REST API that is new in 5.2 which is an essential set of services that enable those front-end libraries to work.

Alfresco confirmed that this focus on ADF means the existing Share client is not receiving much, if any, attention at this point. John Newton said that they are working on an “exemplary” or canonical client built with the ADF. The goal, however, is for that example client to be more focused on a specific use case and not a more general document management use case, which is what Share does. In one of the birds-of-a-feather sessions, the group urged Alfresco engineering to not let the example client accidentally become a de facto Share replacement. Alfresco has a history of releasing example or demo systems that then somehow become real products. Hopefully that won’t be repeated. It’s okay to replace Share at some point, just do so intentionally.

I think the advice I gave last year regarding the ADF still holds, so if you are trying to figure out how the ADF affects your customization plans around Alfresco, read that post.

Not Much Else New and Exciting

If you went to BeeCon looking for big product announcements you were likely disappointed. The cloud and ADF stuff is definitely interesting and critical for Alfresco to stay relevant and so it is naturally sucking every last ounce of energy out of the engineering and product teams leaving little room for innovation in other areas.

John Newton’s talk was basically about “Digital Transformation”, which is what Gartner has decided to call ECM. My clients and I don’t really care what Gartner wants to call what we do. We’re still solving the same problems we’ve always solved using essentially the same approaches with newer tools. That’s just how ECM–sorry, I mean Digital Transformation–is. It’s a mature industry. Should we be shocked that Alfresco did not knock us over with an amazing set of new features no one had ever thought of before? He did hint at some natural learning and machine language applications. I would have loved for him to spend most or all of his talk on that.

Support Tools for Community Edition is a Hot Add-On

Here’s a tip. If you are running Enterprise Edition and you have not installed Support Tools, you need to. It is really helpful for those that administer Alfresco servers. Unfortunately, it has historically been Enterprise-only. But last year, Axel Faust and a merry band of hackers participating in the 2016 Global Virtual Hack-a-Thon wrote their own version of Support Tools that works for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. In my mind, this could be the single most important add-on written by the community since the JavaScript Console. It’s incredibly useful and it has a lot of people actively participating in its development. Definitely take a look if you haven’t.

Fun at the Hack-a-thon

Speaking of the hack-a-thon, this was the first time I’ve been able to participate in the on-site hack-a-thon for the entire day. It was a lot of fun! My team worked on a little add-on that makes it easier to manage rules (convert local rules to shared, relocate rule sets, etc.).

Like all hack-a-thons it was a little unnerving because you feel a lot of pressure to build something minimally viable with the time and team that you have but I highly recommend the experience. Axel Faust did a great job facilitating the day-long session for the 20 or so attendees from a variety of backgrounds and skillsets.

See You Next Year?

We haven’t identified a location for next year’s conference yet. Before you start shouting out your favorite cities from around the globe, realize a couple of things. The Order of the Bee puts on this conference with an all-volunteer committee. The venue is free or extremely low cost. The free venue together with help from our sponsors allows us to keep the price very low, but it also requires a lot of work from the team which includes a local in-city coordinator to work with the venue, catering, audio-visual, etc. So we do want to hear suggestions, but viable suggestions will take all of that under consideration.

There is some talk of Alfresco resurrecting DevCon. They’ve been a wonderful and supportive sponsor of BeeCon these last two years and as long as the event continues its high signal-to-noise ratio and community inclusiveness (both in terms of the ecosystem and Community Edition, specifically) then it is probably a good thing. Until they commit, we’ll assume there will be a BeeCon 2018, and I hope to see all of you there next year, wherever that may be!

March 12, 2017

Now Available: Alfresco Developer Guide 2nd Edition

After more than 8 years since it was first published, Packt has published a second edition of the Alfresco Developer Guide. Much like the Alfresco product itself, the overall approach and architecture of the book is fundamentally the same, but Ben Chevallereau has given it much-needed updates by adding Share, SDK, and Application Development Framework coverage as well as bringing everything else up-to-date.

Before I talk about what’s in the book, I should mention that although the title says “Alfresco One” the book is applicable to both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. I honestly have no idea why the “One” got added, but that’s a minor quibble.

The first four chapters are essentially the same, with updates here and there to match recent software releases. Chapter 1 introduces content management and Alfresco. Chapter 2 discusses the Alfresco way to develop extensions and customizations. Chapter 3 dives into content modeling. Chapter 4 explains actions, behaviors, transformers, and extractors.

Chapter 5 is when the first serious departure from the first edition occurs. That’s because when the first edition was published, Alfresco Share was just being created. The second edition uses Chapter 5 to discuss Share customizations, primarily focusing on Surf, but also touching on Aikau where it is relevant.

Chapter 6 further expands on application development by exploring the new Application Development Framework based on Angular2.

Chapter 7 returns to familiar territory with web scripts and Chapter 8 covers advanced workflow, although in the second edition it is exclusively focused on Activiti rather than the old jBPM engine.

Chapter 9 is kind of a grab bag of new feature coverage such as the Search Manager and Smart Folders. It also throws in a light example of developing a mobile client for Alfresco using Appcelerator.

Chapter 10 focuses on security and covers the same topics as the first edition (LDAP, SSO, and custom permissions) but with obvious updates.

The appendices originally in the first edition were cut completely which would have been a pain to update. And with the improvements made in the Alfresco-provided documentation over the last eight years they really no longer add much value.

Overall, I think the book still meets its goal of being the quintessential reference for anyone getting started with Alfresco development.

Many people have come up to me over the years and said, “I got my start with Alfresco thanks to your book,” and that makes me happy because that’s exactly what it was for. I’m glad that this new edition will enable a whole new generation of people to get up-to-speed and join us in the vibrant Alfresco community.

The credit for the hard work on the update goes to Ben–you did a great job. We should also recognize Bindu Wavell for the technical editing, which is a huge task. Thanks so much guys!

January 26, 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!

October 26, 2016

Alfresco Maven SDK: Declaring other AMPs as dependencies

I’ve seen a few questions about how to configure an Alfresco project to depend on other add-ons when using the Alfresco Maven SDK, so I thought I’d do a quick write-up on that.

When you use the Alfresco Maven SDK Archetypes to bootstrap a project, you can select one of three project types:

alfresco-allinone-archetype: Referred to simply as “All-in-One”, this type, as the name implies, gives you a project that facilitates creating both a repository tier AMP and a Share tier AMP, plus it includes a working Solr installation.
alfresco-amp-archetype: This sets up a project that generates only a repository tier AMP.
share-amp-archetype: This sets up a project that generates only a Share tier AMP.

In my Alfresco Maven SDK Tutorial I use both the alfresco-amp-archetype and the share-amp-archetype but I don’t really talk about the All-in-One archetype at all. The reason is two-fold. First, I think for most beginners, the smaller, more focused archetypes are less confusing. Second, on the vast majority of my client projects, that’s the setup I use. Usually, I feel like the All-in-One archetype is overkill.

However, there is an advantage the All-in-One archetype has over the other two. It is able to pull in other AMPs as dependencies. With the single-purpose archetypes, your goal is simply to build an AMP. You can run integration tests against that AMP using the embedded Tomcat server, but if you want to test the AMP with other AMPs, you have to deal with that manually. Usually I just deploy the AMPs to a test Alfresco installation that already has the other AMPs deployed.

But with the All-in-One archetype, you can declare those other AMPs as dependencies, and Maven will go grab them from a repository and install them into your local test environment using something called an “overlay”.

Here’s an example. Suppose you are developing some customizations that you know will be deployed to an Alfresco server that will be running the following add-ons: Share Site Creators, Share Site Space Templates, Share Login Announcements, and Share Inbound Calendar Invites. You’d like to test your code alongside these add-ons.

One approach would be to go grab the source for each of these projects and build them locally to produce their AMPs (or download pre-built AMPs), then deploy all of those AMPs to a test server, then deploy your custom AMP and test.

But all of those add-ons happen to live on a public Maven artifact repository called Maven Central. So a better alternative might be to simply list those modules as dependencies and let Maven take care of the rest.

Here’s how it works. When you generate an all-in-one project, the structure includes not only folders that contain your repo and Share AMP source, but also folders representing the Alfresco and Share web applications. For example, here are the files and folders in the root folder of a project called “test-allinone-220”:

pom.xml
repo
run.bat
run.sh
runner
share
solr-config
test-allinone-220-repo-amp
test-allinone-220-share-amp

In our example, your custom code for the repo tier would go in test-allinone-220-repo-amp and your Share tier code would go in test-allinone-220-share-amp.

The repo and share directories are used to build the respective WAR files and they each have their own pom.xml. So to add the other add-ons to our setup, first edit repo/pom.xml. You need to add the add-ons as dependencies, like:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>inbound-invites-repo</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.0</version>
    <type>amp</type>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-site-space-templates-repo</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.2</version>
    <type>amp</type>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-login-ann-repo</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.2</version>
    <type>amp</type>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-site-creators-repo</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.5</version>
    <type>amp</type>
</dependency>

Then, add them again to the overlays section (without the “version” element), like this:

<overlay>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>inbound-invites-repo</artifactId>
    <type>amp</type>
</overlay>
<overlay>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-site-space-templates-repo</artifactId>
    <type>amp</type>
</overlay>
<overlay>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-login-ann-repo</artifactId>
    <type>amp</type>
</overlay>
<overlay>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-site-creators-repo</artifactId>
    <type>amp</type>
</overlay>

That covers the Alfresco WAR. Now for the Share WAR, edit share/pom.xml and add the Share tier dependencies, like:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-login-ann-share</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.2</version>
    <type>amp</type>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-site-creators-share</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.5</version>
    <type>amp</type>
</dependency>

And then the overlays:

<overlay>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-login-ann-share</artifactId>
    <type>amp</type>
</overlay>
<overlay>
    <groupId>com.metaversant</groupId>
    <artifactId>share-site-creators-share</artifactId>
    <type>amp</type>
</overlay>

Now you can run the whole thing–your custom AMPs plus all of the dependencies–by running ./run.sh. As part of the build, you should see the dependencies being downloaded from Maven Central. As the server starts up, if you watch the log, you’ll see the modules get initialized. And when you log in, you’ll be able to test all of the functionality together.

When you are ready to deploy to one of your actual server environments, you have a choice. You can either copy all of your AMPs to the amps and amps_share directories, then run bin/apply_amps.sh. Or you can deploy the WAR files that are now sitting under repo/target and share/target. Personally, I think re-applying the AMPs against a fresh WAR on the target server is less confusing and less error-prone, but I’ve seen it done both ways.

If the add-ons you want to depend on are not on a public Maven artifact repository like Maven Central, you can still build them locally, run “mvn install” to install them into your local Maven repository, then depend on them as shown.

October 15, 2016

Activiti founders fork the project to create Flowable, an open source BPM engine

On Thursday the news broke that Activiti had been forked to create a new open source Business Process Management (BPM) engine called Flowable. Activiti is a BPM engine that Alfresco Software, Inc. funded to replace JBoss jBPM. The Activiti engine can automate business processes as a standalone application, but it is also the embedded workflow engine that Alfresco ships as part of its ECM platform.

A fork is when the evolution of an open source project intentionally diverges. Instead of one code base controlled by a single entity, a fork creates a second code base from the first, allowing each project to evolve separately going forward in accordance with their own distinct roadmap and governance model.

Forks happen fairly frequently, and in places like GitHub, where a lot of collaboration around open source software takes place, they happen constantly, by design. But when a significant fork happens to a project, especially one that has commercial backing, like this one, it is worth taking note. Alfresco depends on Activiti for its ECM platform, so now it will be forced to either continue to develop Activiti under their own direction, or switch to the new project like any other upstream dependency.

The news of the fork comes about a month after my blog post reporting that multiple Activiti engineers had resigned from Alfresco. It is now public that those engineers were Joram Barrez and Tijs Rademakers, who were absolutely the heart and soul of the Activiti project. Those departures left a big question mark hanging over the future of Activiti.

Then the big news came on Thursday. Tijs Rademakers released this tweet, announcing a new project, Flowable, with a link to a blog post.

The blog post outlined some high-level reasons for the fork:

“We acknowledge Alfresco’s stewardship of the Activiti.org project, and as employees we enjoyed considerable freedom to develop the project over several years. However, things didn’t work out as we expected or hoped. We came to the conclusion the only way to continue evolving our ideas was to fork.”

The blog post goes on to talk about forks, in general, and their potential impact.

I wanted more detail so I spent some time talking to members of the new Flowable project last week to understand why they forked Activiti and what we can expect going forward.

The first thing that is immediately obvious when talking to any of the former Activiti engineers is how much passion they have for the project. Leaving Alfresco was clearly a hard decision. But the hardest part was feeling disconnected from the software they created and the fear that the project would no longer have the stewardship it enjoyed prior to their departure. “We couldn’t just leave it there,” said one of the engineers. Indeed, looking at the Activiti forum as well as the commits for Activiti on GitHub, it is obvious that Alfresco is still working to rebuild the Activiti team.

After their departure, the former employees continued to discuss with Alfresco Software how they might be able to move forward, but the two sides could not reach an agreement. It soon became obvious to the team that in order to move the project forward they would have to take more direct control, and the only way to do that was to fork.

Specifically, the team started with the latest Activiti release, 5.21.0, and added a new feature called “transient variables” and some other small enhancements as well as bug fixes, and released that as Flowable 5.22.0 (GitHub).

It’s actually not unlike the creation of MariaDB after Oracle acquired Sun (and then became owners of MySQL). In fact, it is the stated goal of the engineers for Flowable to be a drop-in replacement for Activiti, just like MariaDB is for MySQL.

The engineers say they are looking forward to getting back to their open source roots. “In true open source fashion, we want people to get involved in whatever way they can, whether that’s documentation, testing, or code contributions,” said the team. The Flowable project will run as a meritocracy, with trusted developers earning commit rights over time, regardless of their commercial affiliation.

The fork has actually made many people in the community a lot more comfortable with the direction of the project because the engineers who created the software and made the vast majority of the commits during its life are now committed to moving it forward, and this fork gives them the freedom to do it. “Everyone has been supportive so far,” the team said, “Now the burden is on us to start releasing.”

Clearly, Alfresco Software is unhappy with the fork. In a blog post published Friday, John Newton, Alfresco co-founder and CTO, said he was hoping for a different outcome:

“Unfortunately, some of my early friends on the Activiti project have disagreed with our direction and have taken the step of forking the Activiti code. This is disappointing, because the work that they have done is very good and has generally been in the spirit of open source. However, the one thing that we could not continue to give them was exclusive control of the project. I truly wish that we could have found a way to work with them within a community framework.”

John’s post indicates that the company intends to continue to develop Activiti. John writes, “We are redoubling our determination to grow Activiti faster, better and more openly.”

Growing Activiti faster will be key. If Alfresco is slow to field a new Activiti team and then fails to give the market what it wants at the pace it wants it, those stuck on a lagging codebase may become frustrated, particularly if Flowable is able to out-innovate Alfresco. Flowable has the advantage here because they are the original core team, they are more nimble, and they can hit the ground running. But without Alfresco as a sponsor, Flowable engineers must find a way to earn a living as well as move the project forward. Ideally they will be able to make the two intersect by finding clients to pay them to stay focused on the project.

Alfresco’s product and strategy depends heavily on Activiti. From a purely commercial perspective it is understandable they would want as much control over the codebase as possible. However, there are other commercial open source companies that have strategic dependencies on upstream open source projects they don’t fully control. Elastic’s dependency on Lucene comes to mind. If Alfresco could participate in the Flowable project in a similar way it could potentially benefit everyone, but John’s post seems to indicate that is not in the cards. The next few months will tell us just how committed the company is to continuing with Activiti as a separate project.

Personally, regardless of what happens with Activiti, I hope Flowable flourishes. If team member passion was the only predictor of success I’d say it’s a sure bet it will.