Introduction

A couple of weeks ago one of our clients asked me to prepare some documentation on the CQ/JCR RESTful services I had created for them.

I had previously came across this post on TSS about the latest release of enunciate. Unfortunately, I quickly forgot. Then Bill reminded me about it a couple days ago. He is working on a REST/Flex project and he too came across it. Its all coming together now.

enunciate

While enunciate can do a variety of things, I was only interested in the generated JAX-RS/JAXB documentation (HTML). My personal opinion is that the generated documentation is not only useful but also well designed. As a colleague commented, it is pretty. Here is a screenshot of the documentation for JC-Rest.

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This week I integrated CQ with Amazon S3 via the JCR observation API and Mule.

First, the business need. The client was making extensive use of the CQ media library, and that is just fine. As media library assets are requested, they are cached on the web server(s). The issue at hand is file size and bandwidth. The client wanted to push the larger files to S3 to save on bandwidth, they also wanted to continue using the CQ authoring interface to manage media assets. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

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Introduction

Content Management Interoperability Services

Specification (Alfresco) - Download
Alfresco CMIS (Wiki) - View

I read part I of the specification the other day. This part covers the services and the data model. This is just a brief summary of my notes. I suspect I’ll be reading over and over the next few days, so I plan to make updates to this post. Anyways, here are my notes…

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I’ve updated JC-Rest to include a  few new services and have updated a few others. In addition to be able to return properties for a node, the nodes services can now return attributes (is locked, is checked out, etc) too. I’ve also added a few services for creating nodes, properties, and what not. Finally, I added a service to return the repository attributes.

The result is an updated JCR browser that displays the following:

• node tree
• node properties
• node attributes
• repository attributes
• repository events

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I can’t begin to stress how important it is to get it right the first time around. Once you begin building an web content managed site, you don’t have the privilege of refactoring.

Here are a few things that I find important when architecting a web content managed site.

Information Architecture/Site Hierarchy

This may very well be the most important aspect of your site. To be honest, the information architecture is your site hierarchy. However, it still requires a great deal of thought. Building navigation components can be difficult without a well defined site hierarchy. Let us consider an ecommerce example.

- home
- - catalog
- - - books
- - - - book1
- - - - book2
- - - magazines
- - - - mag1
- - - - mag2

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I’m happy to announce the initial release of JC-Rest. This is an application that provides a set of RESTful services for accessing content in a JCR repository. These services can return XML, JSON, ATOM, or even HTML via custom FreeMarker templates.

http://code.google.com/p/jc-rest/

Back in June I wrote a post that talked about building RESTful services using CXF (JAX-RS), Spring, Spring Modules (JCR), and the JCR API. To sum it up, I was working with a client who was using CQ. It didn’t take long before several other applications all required access to the CQ content. Since CQ doesn’t provide an easy means to do this, I wrote a set of highly customized services to return the content. The services were written to meet the requirements of each individual client application that required specific content.

When all was said and done, I realized there was quite a bit of redundancy. Not only technically, but logically as well. I came to the conclusion that it would have been better to build a smaller set of abstract, generalized services. And then perhaps allow for some customization on top them. That is what led me to build JC-Rest.

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Alfresco Surf

I spent a couple days last week evaluating the Alfresco Surf platform. You can download it here as part of the Alfresco Labs 3b release. It is one part web framework, and one part site construction framework. I think that there is a difference here. I think that web frameworks such as Wicket and Stripes are more about page rendering and not so much about site construction. Typically, site construction is a feature provided by web content management (WCM) systems such as Day Communique (CQ). What Alfresco was able to do was abstract the site construction framework away from the WCM system itself. As a result it can be used to build applications outside of Alfresco. As a side note, Alfresco’s next generation WCM system is built on top of the Surf framework.

Note/Update: After discussing this with some coworkers I realized that Alfresco Surf is a lot like a portal framework. It is certainly not a portal technically (JSR 168/286), but it is similar to one in practice. After all, Alfresco Share was built on the Surf platform and Share is a lot like a portal. It is, after all, a dashboard with ‘dashlets’. A Surf application could be in its simplest form a collection of web script clients assembled as components via a template to create a page. That is pretty similar to adding a bunch WSRP portlets to a portal page. This might be where I get the ’site construction’ aspect from.

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So, I’ve been working on a RESTful application to expose content in CRX added by authors in CQ to other applications.

I’ve been using the SQL syntax. I suppose this is because my background includes data architecture and modeling. Yes, I have a black belt SQL Kung Fu. Now we are considering using the XPath syntax instead. I noticed that the JCR specification suggests that database backed repositories are limited in the number of efficient XPath queries they can support. The key word there for me was ‘efficient’. It also notes that, for database backed repositories, XPath queries are translated to SQL queries. So that got me thinking. Should I continue to use the SQL syntax and database backed repositories, or not? Actually, for maintenance purposes, I’ve already suggested that we move to the Tar persistence manager. I suppose I’ll switch to the XPath syntax then.

What do you think?

So until next time, good fight, good night.

I’ve been working with CQ for the last few years. I’ve been working directly with JCR API for the last several months. Finally, I decided to read the JCR specification. I was surprised (well maybe not too much) to see that CQ discards quite a few JCR features in favor of implementing them within the application logic. Personally, I’m not too happy about that. If a feature is supported by the repository, why reinvent the wheel in your application?

Let’s get right into it.

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I’m often asked what is the best way to go about building a WCM enabled application. I’ve learned over the past few years that there is actually a large number of options here. I’m not just talking about products, but rather architectural approaches.

I think the first question to ask is, ‘Do you need a WCM enabled application or do you simply need a content driven application?’. If you don’t need a ’site builder’, or the ability to have business users build out the site, then you can likely do with just a content driven application.

What I’m starting to see now as that instead of complete WCM enabled applications, we can get away with simple content driven applications. I came across a requirement the other day where the client merely wanted the ability to change text on a page without redeploying the application. Well, you don’t necessarily need an enterprise grade WCM application for that. You just need to pull the text from a repository. This is no different than pulling product information from a database. However, there are cases where a complete WCM enabled application is required.

Here are the options I typically consider.

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