The Gang

I just posted two articles on my blog covering a program called “Built in 60” where we try to create simple Alfresco extensions in roughly an hour (not a hard limit). Additionally I cover one particular project to build a Google OneBox Module for the Google Search Appliance. Check it out!

Mike has just posted about ADW, our first serious foray into the page and site construction business, and my excitement at what this represents has prompted me to dive in and start blogging. More about who I am and what I do at Alfresco later (perhaps!), but for now I’d like to focus on what ADW represents, and why you too should be excited by it.

First up, the thing that excites me most about ADW is what it represents in terms of the Alfresco WCM product lifecycle. ADW would not have been possible without a solid infrastructure base, and its existence is evidence that, barely a year after its first release, Alfresco WCM is a robust platform on which to build sophisticated, managed web sites. Simply put, ADW would not have been possible without all of the infrastructure functionality that Alfresco WCM brings to the table - a robust repository, sandboxed content development / virtualisation, versioning, workflow, deployment, to name but a few.

Secondly, ADW is unique in focusing not only on the well defined problems of page composition, but also on the broader (and less well defined) issues of site composition. By this I mean the definition, management and delivery of the “object graph” of a site - the navigation model, how that model is “decorated” with content, how a visitor’s session and profile interact with the graph, how links are handled (both in terms of physical URL formatting and how the creation and management of links occurs), how templates are associated with various parts of the graph, and so on.

This area is a particular interest of mine, since I’ve worked with a variety of WCM-related systems that either:

1. focused primarily on the page composition problem, and either ignored or constrained the site compositional aspects of WCM (eg. portal servers, Drupal, Joomla!, the Nuke variants, MVC frameworks)
2. focused primarily on the site composition problem, and either ignored or constrained the page compositional aspects of WCM (eg. Vignette MCM and VCM)
3. left the design and implementation of both page and site composition as an exercise for the reader (eg. Interwoven TeamSite, Day CRX, ColdFusion Spectra)
4. provided an “integrated bundle” of disparate systems for site composition and page composition (eg. Vignette Dynamic Portal, a mashup of two separate Vignette technologies - VCM and VAP)

In ADW I see the potential for this artificial divide to finally be bridged without favouritism one way or the other - an incredibly exciting prospect!

Thirdly, experience tells me that some, perhaps many, Alfresco WCM customers will want to continue using their favourite page composition tools, be they J2EE based (portal servers, Struts2, Wicket, Grails, what-have-you) or not (Drupal, Joomla!, the Nukes, etc.). ADW is positioned to be able to provide the site composition model that these tools typically lack, while also suggesting ways in which the page layout configuration of these systems could be persisted into Alfresco WCM, thereby getting the best of both worlds:

1. sophisticated page composition from a familiar tool / framework
2. enterprise grade management (sandboxes, versioning, workflow, deployment) of page layout configuration via Alfresco WCM

As you might imagine these are some big shoes to fill, but the Alfresco team has the brains and experience to navigate this minefield successfully. Better yet, being open source, you have the ability to get involved yourself, and there’s nothing better than having an active community helping to steer us in the right direction!

Cheers,
Peter