1.3 Customisation Features
One of the focuses for the 1.3 release was ease of customisation. These features built on the configuration extension mechanism we added in 1.2.
As mentioned in my previous post a new dialog and wizard framework has been added in 1.3. A majority of the wizards in the web client have been converted to the new framework, this makes it a lot easier to customise the wizards, for example, to add a new action into the Rule Wizard no longer requires changes to the Alfresco files. There are several other example customisations in the wiki.
The Property Sheet has also been significantly enhanced in 1.3. All the components used to represent the properties are now generated using the Component Generator Framework, this allows custom components to be plugged in for properties and associations and the defualt implementations to be replaced. The “show-in-edit-mode” and “show-in-view-mode” atrributes now allow properties to be hidden and properties now adhere to their declaration in the model. For example, if the property is mandatory the OK button will be disabled until it is populated or if a property has constraints (a new 1.3 repository feature) they are enforced i.e. the property has to be in a certain range.
There are loads of other new features in the 1.3 release, check them out!
June 18th, 2006 at 3:04 am
Plug-ability / modularity are one of the most important goals of any open source product. Need we look further then the giants; Apache HTTPD, Eclipse, and Fire Fox. Cheers to Alfresco for it’s strives. At the Application Layer (An area in the stack which is currently in the process of being trail blazed by Alfresco, Sugar CRM, and a few others) the need to be plug-able is more critical than ever before.
On top of that, Alfresco is blazing trail in JSF. WOOT!
Gavin, what are lessons learned in the last year with JSF. Did I hear you say you were going to do a PodCast on JSF hehehe? What do you think of the next JSF spec, SHALE, and MyFaces?
June 19th, 2006 at 9:27 am
A JSF podcast has been mentioned in the past so you never know
JSF has been great, admittedly there’s a bit of a learning curve when you come to develop custom components but overall it’s very easy and quick to create a feature rich UI. The other problem is the well documented “content interweaving” issue where you’re forced to use the horrible f:verbatim tag. The new 1.2 spec has resolved this problem apparently and there are some new additions that should help with supporting AJAX so it looks good, just waiting to see when MyFaces has a 1.2 based implementation!
Shale is an interesting one, it seems to add more and more features but doesn’t get any nearer to release from what I can see. Having said that it seems that all the JSF AJAX components recently announced by Sun are using Shale’s remoting library (which incidentally we’re also investigating for our forthcoming AJAX components) so we’ll having to wait and see I guess.
What do you think of the next JSF spec, Shale and MyFaces?
August 9th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article 1.3 Customisation Features, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.