Posts Tagged ‘Alfresco’
Upcoming Day/Alfresco Events with CITYTECH
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
It is turning out to be quite a busy month. I am going to be speaking at 3 events over the next couple weeks.
Day CQ5 Product Tour
CITYTECH will be supporting the midwest leg.
4/21 – Minneapolis
4/22 – Chicago
4/23 – Columbus
I’ll be speaking in Columbus while Jeff & Satish will be speaking in Chicago.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m a huge fan of CQ5. At CITYTECH, we call it the Cadillac of web content management systems. In addition to covering CQ5, I’m going to be dicussing aspects of web content management in general. If web content management is important to your business, I think you’ll find a great deal of value in attending.
Alfresco Chicago Meetup
I’ll be presenting on CMIS during the “barcamp”.
4/29 – Chicago
Nancy has done a great a job with the Alfresco community events. I always enjoy them. They are casual, informative, social, and a great time in general. I’d strongly encourage anyone to attend regardless of their level of experience with Alfresco.
CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference
CITYTECH is going to be presenting on Alfresco (DM/WCM) and CMIS.
4/30 & 5/1 – Evanston (Chicago)
Thursday morning Jeff and Tom will be discussing document management/collaboration. In the afternoon I’ll be dicussing CMIS. Finally, on Friday, John will be discussing web content management.
In addition to Alfresco, CMS Expo will be featuring professional training on Joomla! and Drupal.
You can always find my dropping some tweets on Alfresco, Day CQ, CMIS, architecture, and Battlestar Galactica on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/shane_dev
So until next time, good fight, good night.
Alfresco Tech Talk – CMIS
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
What went right?
- I was able to demo the CMIS explorer live.
- I was able to demo Sten’s CMIS visualizer live.
- I was able to walk through my prepared OO presentation.
What went wrong?
CMIS Explorer – Download
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
I’ve been working on the CMIS explorer on and off for the past few weeks. I think it is about time I made it available for download. I’d be interesting in hearing feedback on it.
Update: The project is now available on Google Code here.
Or, you can go straight for the download. The current download is for the CMIS 1.0 specification.
Update: I have fixed the code so that there are no more hard coded URLs. It has been tested in both Windows and Ubuntu against both local and remote repositories. Have fun.
Update: I just realized that there is still a hard coded URL in the source. That means it will only work against Alfresco running locally on port 8080. I’ll get that fixed up right away. I’ll be curious to see if it will work against another repository afterwards.
Alfresco Code Camp : Chicago – Complete
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
Today, John and I spoke at the Alfresco Code Camp in Chicago.
I discussed the Surf framework, Alfresco Share, and CMIS.
John did a outstanding job discussing Site Studio and provided some great exercises.
Update: The updated Share exercises (for the attendees) can be downloaded here.
A few notes about the exercises:
- It is best to use a fresh copy of the VM provided. If you don’t have the original zip you can use your existing VM, but you’ll be overwriting some of the files instead of creating new ones.
- I specified a path to the Share home at the beginning. The paths specified for each of the files to be created are relative to this Share home path unless otherwise specified.
- It is important to do the steps in the order specified. You will need to copy over the artifacts from the zip as well as delete and recreate the sample content.
- If you have any issues, feel free to post a comment here. If you don’t, also feel free to post a comment here.
Flex/AIR, CMIS, & Alfresco
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
Intro
Last week I started building a CMIS browser with Adobe AIR.
I have built POCs with Flex before, but that was about it. Then, I downloaded thwirl and I remembered why I like AIR so much. It was easy to install, the UI is nice, and I imagine it was not too difficult to write. This is also a great example of why I like RESTful services too. I believe in the physical separation of the presentation tier, and working with RESTful services is a breeze. So is writing them for that matter. Twitter is a great example of building a social services platform and allowing for the development of third party applications to utilize it. It is a win, win situation. Perhaps ‘platform’ is the key word there. I’d like to shift from building web applications to building web platforms.
So, I decided to build a CMIS browser with AIR.
Update: The CMIS Explorer is now available for download. See this post.
Alfresco Surf: I like it.
Monday, September 29th, 2008
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.
Web Content Management – Architectural Approaches
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
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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