In 2005, we felt that the time was right for an open source content management system to challenge the enterprise software landscape. With over 20 years of content management experience, we created Alfresco as a platform for enterprise-scale content management to manage, distribute, and access critical business content, including web sites, office documents, records, images, and rich media. We chose to take an open source approach because we wanted to create Alfresco in a way that was accessible, open, and encouraged community participation.
Professional Alfresco is an in-depth introduction to the Alfresco CMS by the people who built it. It provides you with an overview of Alfresco, its core capabilities and architecture, and the methods to extend it with its RESTful interfaces and lightweight scripting with Alfresco Share as a starting point. This book will help you understand the value of content in your application and show you how to build content-rich applications or web sites that integrate with your enterprise environment or web presence. With detailed guidance and best practices, you will be able to control the exponential growth of content in your organization.
As the creators of Alfresco, we also wanted to give you an understanding of why we have made the choices we have and to demonstrate that this is a powerful and rich yet simple platform for creating content applications. We hope that this will inspire you to join the community of developers using, extending, building new applications, and contributing to Alfresco.
Professional Alfresco has been created to provide professional developers, system integrators, and architects with the information and guidance they need to implement the Alfresco CMS in an enterprise organization, extending the Alfresco Share application, and integrating Alfresco CMS into existing applications or web sites.
The Alfresco CMS was designed and built using Java, but detailed knowledge of Java development is not required to benefit from this book or to create applications incorporating Alfresco features. Alfresco makes extensive use of popular Web 2.0 techniques, including scripting and RESTful interfaces, to simplify development and improve interoperability.
CTOs, CIOs, IT managers, and IT professionals will be able to use Part I, "Getting to Know Alfresco," to understand what Alfresco is, how it can be used in their business, and the many ways Alfresco Share can be extended to meet specific business requirements. Additionally, Part II, "Getting Technical with Alfresco," will provide you with an overview of the Alfresco environment, including content modeling, authentication and security, and business process design. Chapter 17 will provide you with an introduction of how Alfresco can be integrated with your application or web site.
Application developers with experience in scripting will be able to make use of Part III, "Extending Alfresco with RESTful Services," which includes a range of JavaScript and FreeMarker examples. Part IV, "Extending Share," will lead you through the steps necessary to build a sample Knowledge Base application using Alfresco Share.
Since Alfresco is both an application and a programming platform, any book on Alfresco could be much larger than this. We have chosen to focus on the tools most widely used to build content applications and extend Alfresco for this book. These include Web scripts for accessing the Content Application Server and Spring Surf for building Web applications and extending the Share application: All as a framework for building your content application. In doing so, we assume the latest versions of Alfresco from version 3.2 onwards. However, you may find the examples applicable to other versions as well, particularly for Web scripts.
This book covers the topics needed for you to build content applications with Alfresco, to extend Alfresco and the Share application, and to integrate Alfresco into your application or web site. To do this, we give you grounding in Alfresco by providing an overview of Alfresco and its architecture as well as the use cases for which Alfresco is most applicable. We also provide guidance in setting up your Alfresco environment, along with assistance in configuration, security, setting up content models, and workflow.
As with many rich platforms, there are many ways to develop applications with Alfresco, and we concentrate on those that are easiest and most applicable to certain tasks. There is a strong emphasis on Web scripts, the RESTful framework for using and building APIs for content services. You are also introduced to some of the non-programming ways of extending Alfresco, such as rules and actions and metadata modeling and forms configuration.
We also cover the Spring Surf web runtime platform and the role that it plays in building and extending the Alfresco Share application. Once you learn the fundamentals of Surf, you can then extend the Share application with metadata, forms, menus, and other extensions. All this is tied together and provided in the context of an example Knowledge Base application, a typical use for the Alfresco system.
Finally, you will see how Alfresco can be used to extend your application or web site in the patterns that are found in many of the integrations that add content-rich capabilities by accessing or including the Alfresco system.
Professional Alfresco is organized into the following parts:
Part I, "Getting to Know Alfresco," introduces you to what Alfresco is, its place in the open source software market, and the business benefits that make Alfresco so widely applicable.
Part II, "Getting Technical with Alfresco," includes a full set of architectural diagrams, providing the reader with both a high-level overview of Alfresco and details on its components, services, and security, explaining how they work together.
Part III, "Extending Alfresco with RESTful Services," explains how to extend Alfresco with web scripts, allowing you to extend the Alfresco data model and deliver custom functionality.
Part IV, "Extending Share," shows you how these extensions can then be tightly integrated with Alfresco core functionality by extending the end-user interface, as demonstrated through the creation of a Knowledge Base sample application with different levels of complexity.
Finally, the book discusses patterns of content management integration with Alfresco as a component of other applications, such as IBM Lotus Quickr and Drupal.
There are many examples given in this book, all of which can be followed on a standard laptop or server that provides the minimum specification for running an instance of Alfresco. The Alfresco server can run on a range of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, and Mac OS X. Likewise, a range of different databases can be used, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQLServer, DB2, and Ingres. The Alfresco web applications can be deployed in a number of different Application Servers, including JBoss, Tomcat, Weblogic, and Websphere.
The minimum hardware requirements for a single instance of Alfresco are 2GB RAM and 1GB hard disk.
Throughout the book it is assumed Microsoft Windows is being used, simply for convenience and not any emotional or commercial preference. Also, the book assumes a standard installation of Alfresco is performed through the full installation wizard, which means that Tomcat and MySQL are being used. This is reflected in all the examples.
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