Category: Alfresco Developer Series

The Alfresco Developer Series is a set of articles aimed at getting you up-to-speed on the Alfresco platform.

Alfresco recognizes ecmarchitect.com’s Alfresco Developer Series

I’m very pleased to announce to ecmarchitect.com readers that Alfresco has chosen me as their Community Contributor of the Month for December, 2007. This is primarily in recognition of the Alfresco Developer Series articles I’ve posted this year which are aimed at bringing new developers up-to-speed on the platform.

I’m extremely flattered that Alfresco chose me to be the first recipient as part of this program. I think it highlights the fact that in the open source community, there are numerous ways you can get involved that can add value, whether that’s by writing code, helping test a new release, contributing a project to the forge, or writing documentation.

I’m also fortunate that Optaros encourages and expects employees to get involved in the open source community–it’s one of the many reasons I joined the company.

Last, thanks to everyone at Alfresco (John Newton, Matt Asay, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Kevin Cochrane, Luis Sala) and Optaros (Marc Osofsky, Dave Gynn, John Eckman, Brian Doyal) for encouraging, reviewing and promoting the articles.

And a special thanks to those of you that have read the articles and left comments or approached me at conferences over the past year. Knowing you are getting value out of this stuff makes it worthwhile.

Okay, cue the music and cut my mike. I’m off to the after party.

Get your Alfresco ‘flow on

With the busy holiday season approaching, it’s hard to find time to streamline your content-centric business processes. Here’s a tip: Buy everyone gift cards. Use the time saved to learn how to implement advanced workflows using Alfresco‘s embedded JBoss jBPM engine. This article and the accompanying source code should be everything you need to get started and then some.

The article starts by describing jBPM concepts and the high-level steps for implementing advanced workflows in Alfresco and then dives into the details by walking you through an example.

The example extends the “SomeCo Whitepapers” story from earlier articles in the Alfresco Developer Series by implementing a business process to enable SomeCo’s engineering team, marketing team, and third-party partners to review whitepapers before being published to the SomeCo web site.

The integration of third-party partners is handled through email–recipients simply click a link to approve or reject the workflow task.

As in prior articles, the source code bundle is cumulative–it contains all of the “SomeCo” code we’ve worked on thus far.

About the “Alfresco Developer” series of articles

The Alfresco Developer Series of articles is a collection of technical tutorials aimed at getting you up-to-speed quickly on the key aspects of Alfresco. The series covers extensions and customizations performed during a typical Alfresco implementation by walking through a realistic example that is expanded upon in each successive article. The content is based on real-world Alfresco projects executed by the Optaros ECM practice for clients around the globe.

Past articles include:

Give Alfresco a REST!

UPDATE (2/2014): This tutorial has been updated. Please use the latest version rather than the one linked to in this post.

A REST API, that is. The latest in the Alfresco Developer Series is an Introduction to the Web Script Framework which shows you how to create your own REST API to the Alfresco repository. As usual, the article has Example Source Code you can download and try out on your own.

The intent of the article is to walk through some hands-on examples using Alfresco’s Web Script Framework which became available in the 2.1 release of the product. The article extends the “SomeCo Whitepapers” example started in the Custom Content Model and Custom Behavior articles by using Web Scripts to create a REST API for creating user-contributed ratings. Front-end developers wire an AJAX ratings widget to the REST API to allow users to rate whitepapers on the SomeCo web site.

Give it a read, try out the code, and let me know what you think.

Read more about the Alfresco Developer Series.

New Alfresco tutorial on implementing custom behaviors

I’ve written a follow-on article to “Alfresco Developer: Working with Custom Types”. This one is on implementing custom behavior. In the new article (with accompanying source code), I build on the SomeCo Whitepapers example by adding support to the content model for user-contributed ratings of whitepapers. The custom behavior is used to calculate the average rating for each piece of rated content.

My plan is to follow on shortly with an article that shows how to use Alfresco’s new REST-based Web Script framework to enable the front-end to rate (and get the rating of) content in the Alfresco repository.

So take a look and let me know what you think.

More about the Alfresco Developer Series.

New Alfresco tutorial on working with a custom content model

UPDATE (2012): I’ve recently published a second edition of this tutorial that updates the original with Alfresco Share and CMIS.

UPDATE (2014): I’ve moved the tutorial and the source code to GitHub. The HTML version of the tutorial is here. It has been updated for Maven and AMPs.

I’ve written a new article (with sample files) that talks about how to extend Alfresco with your own content model and how to work with content that leverages that model via the Web Services API. All of the examples are written in Java but I do include one in PHP just for grins.

Most of the code is based on the Alfresco SDK Web Services sample code, but I’ve tweaked it here and there and I break it down into smaller chunks with commentary. I also think it is good to have one example to follow that takes you from designing the content model to implementing it to writing code that might leverage it.

More about the Alfresco Developer Series.