Alfresco Blogs

Nancy Garrity: Community Update, April 2008

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:51:04 +0000

April proved to be another busy month around the Alfresco community. One of the highlights from my vantage point was the Barcelona BarCamp on April 21st. Almost fifty community members gathered for this developer-focused event to share demos, best practices and hear talks from our engineers on a variety of topics.

There was also overflow attendance (>220) at the Community Conference, which followed on April 22nd. You can find a link to the recorded talks on our Facebook page.

The Shimano and Acquity team have been doing some great work on a digital asset management application developed with Alfresco web scripts. Tune in on May 14th, for a webinar to learn what they did and how they did it. More details here.

Alfresco’s technical field staff will answer your questions live during our new Tech Talk Live series. The first session was held on April 25th. To get the schedule and to learn how to attend a session see the wiki.

Plans are underway for the first gathering of the Alfresco New York Meetup on May 13th. If you live in the area and are interested in learning more, see the Meetup site.

The first winner in the Web Scripts Developer Challenge is already enjoying his new his Apple iPod 16GB Touch. You have four more chances to win.

We are looking for a few good people and offering a referral bonus of 1,000 British pounds (about $2,000 USD). The bonus is payable after six months and all the other usual restrictions apply. Learn more.

Jeff Potts: My Summer Project: a Book

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:53:20 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, but as faithful readers have noticed, it hasn’t been in the blog. What’s the cause of the post slowdown? I’ve taken on a project that I hope you’ll be excited about. This Spring, Packt approached me about writing an Alfresco developer’s guide. Honestly, I went back-and-forth with the idea. Ultimately, it was the encouragement from ecmarchitect.com readers that swayed my decision.

I began writing on President’s Day. I thought the Alfresco Developer Series articles would be a good start and would save some time, and they have, but they represent a relatively small portion of the overall work and I’m doing a fair amount of restructuring of that content. The current schedule has the writing finishing up toward the end of summer with us going to press some time after that.

Optaros is fully behind the project–there’s no way I could do this without their support. Alfresco is excited about it too, although we’re all expecting the timing to be a bit tricky with 3.0 coming out in roughly the same time frame. I’m currently making sure all example code runs on both the latest Enterprise release as well as the latest Community release–we’ll see if I can keep that up. It remains to be seen how much of the new 3.0 web client I’ll be able to cover based on the timing.

So that’s why posts and comment responses have slowed down a bit. I think I’ve caught up on responding to comments (and keep those coming, by the way). If you posted a comment within the last month or so and never saw anything from me, you might have a look to see if I’ve addressed your question, especially on the Web Scripts as Liferay Portlets post, which saw a lot of activity.

Nancy Garrity: Announcing The Alfresco Chumby Awards for Community Achievement

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:28:48 +0000

What is a Chumby and how do you score one? Simply put, Chumbys are little marvels of technology that are about the size of a coffee cup, have a touch screen, connect wirelessly to the Internet and have a library of addon widgets. What is probably more interesting, especially to the Alfresco community, is that Chumbys are Linux-based, open-source development platforms.

Most people will use them as an alarm clock to wake them up in the morning, to view digital photos, to listen to Internet radio, to check the news, weather and sports, to look up a recipe — all of the usual ways that we interact with Internet-based devices.

We couldn’t think of a better way to reward community participation each month than to give a Chumby to the person who has answered the most questions on the forums. We can’t wait to see what clever Chumby web scripts our community members will build (think URL-based access to content and content services).

While we know that coming to the aid of your fellow community members in the forums is its own reward, we are excited to be able to offer a little additional incentive.

Fine print: the winner will be selected based on the number of points accumulated and you can only win once.

Jeff Potts: Dopplr Counts your Carbon

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:08:04 +0000

I’m not sure when they added this, but Dopplr has a new feature that keeps track of your carbon totals by month and year. For 2008, I’m already at 6,000 kilograms. I’ll bet I’m not in Optaros’ top ten. Hey, Optaros, in the spirit of Earth Week, how about making carbon offsets a reimbursable business expense for us road warriors?

Jeff Potts: Running Alfresco web scripts as Liferay portlets

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:55:10 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of Liferay and Alfresco forum posts from people having trouble getting Alfresco running within a Liferay portal. Once that’s done, people usually want to invoke Alfresco web scripts as portlets without requiring a separate single sign-on (SSO) infrastructure. Some people have pointed to the Alfresco wiki (Deploying 2.1 WAR Liferay 4.3). That is a helpful reference but it isn’t the full story. Here are some notes that may help.

1. Download the Liferay 4.3.6 + Tomcat 5.5 JDK5 bundle. I had mixed results with the latest release 4.4.2. You may be tempted to try to download the WAR-only distribution and configure it in your existing Tomcat instance. In this case, save yourself the time and headache and get the bundle. Fool with the WAR distribution later.

2. Unpack the Liferay distribution and fire it up. Make sure you can log in as the test@liferay.com (password: test) user to validate that all is well with the Liferay install.

2a. Create a test user. (”Create Account” on the Liferay login screen). Remember the email address. This will matter shortly. For this discussion I’ll assume Foo User with a screen name of fuser and an email address of fuser@foo.com. Make sure you create a home directory. In this example, we’ll call it “fuser”.

2b. Verify that you can log in as your test user.

3. Shut down the server.

4. Download Alfresco 2.1.2 Enterprise, WAR only. Alfresco 2.1.1 has a known issue (AWC-1686) with the way authentication is handled for web scripts in the context of Liferay so make sure you are using 2.1.2.

5. Expand the Alfresco 2.1.2 WAR into the Tomcat webapps/alfresco directory (which you’ll have to create the first time). If you are tweaking the install (such as pointing to a specific MySQL database, using something other than MySQL, pointing to a different data directory, etc.) make sure you have copied your good set of extensions into Tomcat’s shared/classes/alfresco/extension directory.

6. Copy the MySQL connector into Tomcat’s common/lib directory.

7. Start Tomcat. When it comes up, you’ll have Liferay running and you’ll have Alfresco running, but Liferay doesn’t yet know about Alfresco. Verify that you can log in to Alfresco as admin.

7a. While you are here, create a test user account. You need to create a user account that has an email address that matches the test user account you created in Liferay. In this example you created Foo User with a screen name of fuser and an email address of fuser@foo.com so you need to create an Alfresco user with the same settings. You’ll log in to Alfresco as fuser. You’ll log in to Liferay as fuser@foo.com.

7b. Verify that you can log in to Alfresco as fuser.

8. Shut down Tomcat.

9. Now you need to configure Alfresco as a Liferay plug-in. This involves adding four files to Alfresco’s WEB-INF directory: liferay-display.xml, liferay-plugin-package.xml, liferay-portlet.xml, and portlet.xml. Why aren’t these available in the Alfresco source or on the wiki? Apparently someone tried to address this at some point because there is a link on the wiki but it is broken. Until that’s addressed, I’ve put them here.

10. Remove the portlet-api-lib.jar file from Alfresco’s WEB-INF/lib directory.

11. Re-package alfresco.war. It is now ready to hand over to Liferay.

12. Start Tomcat.

13. Find your Liferay deploy directory. If you are running out-of-the-box on Linux, Liferay’s “deploy” directory is called liferay/deploy and it resides in the home directory of the user who started Tomcat. I’m running it as root so my Liferay deploy directory is /root/liferay/deploy.

14. Copy the alfresco.war you just created into the deploy directory. Watch the log. You should see Liferay working on the WAR. He’s finding the plug-in config files and essentially deploying the Alfresco portlets.

15. Now log in to Liferay using the Liferay admin account (test@liferay.com). Go to a page, then use the global navigation dropdown to select “Add Content”. The list of portlets should appear and you should see the “Alfresco” category. If you don’t, look at the log because something is amiss. Add the My Spaces portlet to the page. You may see an error at this point but ignore it. The problem is you probably don’t have a user in Alfresco that has an email address of “test@liferay.com”, which is the currently-logged in user.

16. Log out.

17. Log in as your test user that exists in both Alfresco and Liferay (fuser@foo.com).

18. Go to the page. You should see the “My Spaces” portlet. You should be able to upload content, create spaces, etc.

Exposing your own web scripts as portlets

All Alfresco web scripts are automatically exposed as JSR-168 portlets, including the ones you create. To add your web scripts as portlets, first make sure you have authentication set to “user” and transaction set to “required” in your web script’s descriptor. Then, update portlet.xml, liferay-portlet.xml, and liferay-display.xml. Follow the pattern that’s in those files already and you’ll be fine. For example, if you deploy the Hello World web script from my web script tutorial, you need to add a new portlet to portlet.xml with a “scriptUrl” like: /alfresco/168s/someco/helloworld?name=jeff. Then you update liferay-portlet.xml and liferay-display.xml with the new portlet name or portlet ID.

Single sign-on with no single sign-on?

The web script runtime has a JSR-168 authenticator. So when your web scripts get invoked by the portlet, the current credentials are passed in. That’s why your web script can run without requiring an additional sign in. Prior to this being put in place, people had to implement Yale CAS (or an equivalent) to get SSO between Liferay and Alfresco web scripts.

What’s not covered in these instructions is that you’ll probably want to (1) configure both Alfresco and Liferay to authenticate against LDAP and (2) change the configuration of either Alfresco or Liferay to use the same credential (either username or email address) for both systems so that if you do have users logging in to both, they don’t have to remember that one requires the full email address but the other doesn’t.

Troubleshooting

If you see one of the Alfresco portlets displaying “Data is not currently available” or somesuch, try hitting
Alfresco in another tab. Log in, then log out. Then go back to the
portal and open the page again. It should work now. I’m not sure what’s going on there. I think it may have to do with me switching back-and-forth between Liferay instances (4.3.2 versus 4.4.2) so maybe you won’t see it.

Open issues

You may see an error like this:

21:22:15,965 WARN [BaseDeployer:1038] Unable to format /usr/local/bin/liferay-4.3.6/temp/20080408212212978/WEB-INF/faces-config-jbpm.xml: Error on line 5 of document file:///usr/local/bin/liferay-4.3.6/temp/20080408212212978/WEB-INF/faces-config-jbpm.xml : A ‘)’ is required in the declaration of element type “application”. Nested exception: A ‘)’ is required in the declaration of element type “application”.

I haven’t chased that down yet. I’ll update this post with a comment when I find out. I’m sure fixing that will also fix the problem that you’ll see if you try to start an advanced workflow from a piece of content displayed in the My Spaces portlet.

I was also seeing an error when trying to use the “Add Content” link in the straight Alfresco client. I think it is JSF-related. Again, I’ll update this post with a comment when it is resolved (or when I find a Jira ticket).

Jeff Potts: MPXJ is a Java API for Microsoft Project files

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:18:19 +0000

Reading Microsoft files from Java code is one of the little joys in life (he said sarcastically, through clenched teeth). I’ve worked with the Apache POI project to do this successfully in the past. I recently came across MPXJ. It sits on top of POI to allow Java developers to manipulate Microsoft Project Exchange (MPX), Microsoft
Project (MPP, MPT), and Microsoft Project Data Interchange (MSPDI) files. The project is at SourceForge.

For readers interested in Alfresco, one thing you can do with this library is use it to create metadata extractors and content transformers for Microsoft Project. The latter enables Project files to be full-text indexed by the Lucene search engine. The MPXJ library depends on the same version of Apache POI that is shipped with Alfresco 2.2 Enterprise and 2.9 Community (Apache POI 3.0.2).

Nancy Garrity: Open Source Really Does Rock

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:03:47 +0000

	We probably all have our own reasons why we love open source software; here is one more real-world example of why open source really does rock. I wanted to implement a feature on our forums where members who post a question can “reward” another person for replying with a helpful response.
We use phpBB forums version 3.0, which does not offer this feature but is an open source project. Cignex, one of our system integration partners with extensive open source experience, offered to build an addon to implemented a points system. Starting today you’ll notice the new feature on the forums.
Here is how it works: if someone replies to a topic that you have created, you will see the option to indicate that the reply was either helpful or not. If you click Yes, then the member will receive one “point”. If you click No then nothing will happen, no points will be deducted.
We’ve added this feature because we want to recognize high achievers on the forums. Try it out, let me know what you think and as always, thanks for participating and a special thanks to Cignex for doing a great job on the addon!

Jeff Potts: Everex should have gone with straight Ubuntu

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:03:45 +0000

I’ve been slowly tweaking the way my family uses their computer to make it easier to migrate everyone to Linux. First, I completely removed Internet Explorer and got everyone used to Firefox. Then, I moved my wife off of her thick email client and onto Gmail. Next, I replaced Office with OpenOffice. Each of those moves was relatively painless. Spreading them out over time helped.

The kids were even easier. When they were younger, they used a lot of PC-based CD-ROM games and educational software. Now ages 6 and 10, they are exclusively into web-based Flash games and virtual worlds. All browser, all the time, although they do seem to enjoy tweaking their wallpaper, changing themes, resetting their passwords, and, oddly, watching the CPU performance graphs. They can out control panel most adults.

Anyway, the spare computer finally became unbearably slow compared to the primary machine and my laptop. I decided I’d get a decent monitor (20″ Dell Ultrasharp 2009W) with a low-end workstation. I went with an Everex gPC2.

I’ve been running Ubuntu for two years, and the gPC’s gOS is based on Ubuntu so I figured it ought to be easy enough for me to support. But I had to do a bit more work than I thought I should based on that fact that this was aimed at the masses. I mean it used to be sold at Wal-Mart for crying out loud. I guess the ideal target end-user is a single user who connects to the net to do absolutely everything. At first blush, my family fits that description. But they also want to share files on the local network. And they want their own login. And they want a decent file manager. And they want to be able to “switch user” instead of logging out to let someone else log in. These are all done effortlessly on Windows and fairly painlessly on straight Ubuntu. On gOS, these seemingly rudimentary feats require additional installs. For those already familiar with Linux, these are fairly simple. But for families without a command-line lover in the house, it would get very frustrating, very fast.

I pushed through it because I’m the only one that has to deal with installation and config. If my family is happy, and if they can get their “work” done without coming to the “help desk”, I’m happy. And at first, my family was excited about the new box. It started up fast, the UI was pretty (my son loved the Mac-ish iBar), and the browser and OO.o worked like they’d expect. After a few days, though, the bleeding edge nature of some of the gOS components started to turn into annoyances:

Segment fault messages on every logout meant an extra close the error dialog.
Fairly often, Firefox complained that it was already running. (This usually happened when someone had just logged out and a new user was logging in and starting up Firefox.)
There was no easy way to mount and navigate Windows shares in the file manager. (I did see a workaround involving Thunar and Fuse but Fuse seemed to be acting a bit fishy–I wasn’t seeing consistent good behavior there).
Reported system freeze-ups. (I never saw any of these first-hand).

After less than a week I finally had enough. What was the gOS buying me? Nothing. Instead, it was costing me time. Today I slapped in the Ubuntu install CD and never looked back.

I still think the $199 I paid for the Everex box was worth it. And judging from the partial success of the gOS experiment, the family is definitely not going to miss Windows. I wonder if there is a group of happy gPC2 users still using gOS out there or if Everex would have done better forgoing some of the eye candy and distributing with a straight Ubuntu install.

Jeff Potts: ScribeFire’s blogging client is sweet

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:07:24 +0000

I am totally digging ScribeFire. It’s a Firefox extension that lets me write blog posts without leaving the web page I’m on. It can post to any blog server that can speak XML-RPC. For me the benefits are:

I don’t have to leave the page or open a new tab to log in to my blog or write a post.
I don’t have to give up any functionality like tagging or categorizing my posts.
The editor seems more reliable than the one built in to Wordpress and Drupal.
I can easily write one post and publish it to both ecmarchitect.com and optaros.com.

Regarding this last point, I try not to have much duplication between the two blogs. There is some overlap, but the purpose and audience of the two blogs are generally separate. Still, when I need to post in both places, ScribeFire saves me a lot of time. I can write the post once, categorize it for ecmarchitect.com, post it, then tweak it if needed, categorize it for optaros.com, then post it there, all in a single UI.

Jeff Potts: Web 2.0 & the Open Source CMS

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:30:53 +0000

Dr. Ian Howells, Alfresco’s Chief Marketing Officer, and I will be doing a webinar on Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise and the impact of these trends on content management.

This web seminar will cover:

The importance of Web 2.0 in the context of content management strategies and the competitive landscape.
How to get beyond the hype and leverage Web 2.0 techniques and technologies to deliver dynamic and interactive content.
How to tap into the fast-growing value of the Web 2.0 ecosystem to drive organizational productivity and competitive advantage, while still meeting the compliance and security needs of business.
How these ideas have been put into practice by Optaros for companies like Endeca and Swisscom using Alfresco Enterprise as the technology platform for a Web 2.0 solution

If you are interested, you can register online here.

Russ Danner: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:48:00 +0000

Good post here. It's thesis: that in the near future the software industry will look a lot like the energy business does today with its regulated and unregulated business; where regulated business is open source and its predictable steady stream of income and where unregulated business is analog to highly vertical, niche software products that are closed, closely guarded and expensive.

Interestingly, the software industry as we know it grew up with unregulated businesses - and only in the last decade has open source created these credible alternatives. I think the future looks similar to the energy industry: large technology companies will have a mix of regulated and unregulated businesses, that maximizes the advantages of both. For standard, widely-used technologies, open source "regulation" makes sense because it lowers development costs and provides a standards-based, predictable subscription base of business. For niche and high-end software, companies will still expect a substantial return on their development cost, and therefore will protect that IP and sell it at a premium until competition makes that impossible. The most successful of these integrated companies will be careful not to exploit the community, and will be respected for having transparency between what parts of their business are "regulated", and which parts aren't.

I certainly see this as the future of Microsoft which is unlikely to go completely open any time soon.

Russ Danner: A Public API and Policy Would Really Help

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:05:00 +0000

If you have ever worked VMS or Windows at the API level you are familiar with the concept of a "Public API" and the concept of an API lifecycle. A public API is one that consumer code can count on. Some code is "for internal use only" while other code is meant specifically for "public consumption. " The public API code is a contract with the outside world. An API lifecycle is a contract between the API and its consumers that provides a level of backward compatibility and stability to the API. API calls never simply change or disappear. They are deprecated and then supported for some period of time before actually being removed. DEC had a really strong policy. DEC API calls would first be deprecated, after a number of releases they would be removed from the documentation but would continue to be supported, and finally after yet another number of releases they would be removed from the source base. Customers were given plenty of warning and time to port their consumer code.

Example:
Windows NT used to have a DLL called NT.dll. All of the actual system calls existed in this library but Microsoft made no commitment to anyone who called its methods directly that they would work from one patch or upgrade to the next. Developers were told specifically to avoid NT.dll and instead to rely on WIN32. NT.dll calls were at liberty to change as often as Microsoft saw fit, while the WIN32 library signatures had to maintain consistency for customers. Microsoft would then take the responsibility of mapping the stable WIN32 API calls to the more volatile NT.dll signatures whenever a call needed to be changed.

Many open source projects do not follow this practice. Some do, I believe Apache Struts for example deprecates for major two releases and removes on the third. As far as I know Alfresco does not have such a policy but I really wish they did. Enterprise customers expect reliability. They demand that versions come out at a slower more digestible pace and I would bet they expect some stability and policy around the backward compatibility of the API.

Today I installed a AMP in 2.9B (community) that is fully functional in 2.1E (enterprise) but does not work properly in 2.9B. The source of the problem is due to a class that has been moved from one package to another. This sort of refactoring happens all the time in source code. It's really important and it has to happen -- but we need to maintain some backward compatibility at the same time.

It may be a semi-valid criticism of this post that I am trying to install something that worked in the enterprise version but breaks in the community version because the community version is a sandbox / lab environment. I would however disagree. The labs release cannot be entirely free to evolve without consideration for any backward compatibility if we expect to build a community willing to contribute plug-ins and add-ons, etc. At OSBC many of the executives, when asked why their developers were taking from open source more than giving responded that it's simply too difficult to package and maintain contributions. This issue is further complicated if you cannot count on compatibility for some reasonable time frame.

There are downsides to maintaining backward compatibility. Backward compatibility code is cruft and can, over time, become weight on the system that impedes innovation. This issue can to some degree be managed by proper factoring of code and packaging as well as policies that attempt to seek balance. Don't try to remain backwardly compatible for more than a reasonable duration. Give customers the ability to port their code forward over the course of one or two upgrades but no more.

Stability and predictability goes beyond releases. If we want to encourage development outside the walls of Alfresco we have to extend some stability to the source code as well. Developers want to know exactly what API calls are public. Additionally they want fair warning when public calls change as well as to be given a sufficient amount of time to port their work.

Michael Uzquiano: Web Framework 3.0

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:14:51 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time migrating core code from the Dynamic Website project into Alfresco Web Framework 3.0.

As many of you know, the Web Framework 3.0 work is a new project that was started not too long ago. It is an entirely separate web-tier project that provides a lightweight backbone for building web applications and web sites. It includes Alfresco Web Scripts and Freemarker processing engines and now also includes a ready-to-go dispatcher, object model and web script APIs for building your own web sites.

The Web Framework 3.0 project forms the foundation at Alfresco for several initiatives. The two most important ones are the Web Client 3.0 and the Alfresco Network products. These two applications will use the Web Framework 3.0 project as a foundation and then build upon it to deliver the end-user applications.

One of the best things about this whole process was that we were able to take a community-built project (Dynamic Website) and pull it apart to separate out the very best bits. As such, the Web Framework 3.0 now includes:

A rich XML object model for describing navigation, pages, templates, components, component bindings, content associations and request context.
A lightweight servlet-based dispatcher that quickly assembles your web application by consulting the XML configured for request states.
Interfaces for request context factories, page mappers, link builders, persistence and more. These elements and more are driven from configuration files, allowing you to plug in your own dispatching behaviors (for instance, URL mapping behaviors).
The full Alfresco Web Script and Freemarker Processing engine.
Enhanced support within Web Scripts to make one or more remote calls to server endpoints to fetch data (JSON, XML) and merge into data sets for downstream processing. Think of the Web Script Engine as an aggregator of remote services on behalf of the client end user.
Support for templates / layouts written in Java, HTML, JSP, Freemarker or as WebScripts (Freemarker with a Javascript behavior). That’s the list, so far. There will also soon be support for dynamic, drag and drop layout assembly. This is something that was in Dynamic Website that I have not yet ported. But I will!
Support for page components written in Java, HTML, JSP or as WebScripts.
Several prebundled web components. So far, these include things like Markup Components, Image Components, Navigation Components and the like. These are being assembled into a “Web Component Library” from which you will be able to draw more advanced components like Google Gadgets, Maps, Newsfeeds and more.
Sample implementations provided out of the box for a Public Web Site, Intranet and Project workspace. These provide reference implementations to help you get up and running quickly.
The ability to self-assemble your own Alfresco Web application and Web Experience.

It’s very exciting stuff and progress is moving swiftly!

One of the very interesting and fun to solve problems in doing a migration like this is that you have to figure out where to “draw the line”. The goal is to keep the framework as lightweight and snappy as possible while still providing the efficiency gains that come from ease-of-use.

To do so, I feel we made several good decisions.

First, we kept the Web Script Framework isolated and on its own. Thus, folks who want to just build the Web Script engine and produce a WAR file with the Web Script engine standalone can still do so.

Second, we created the Web Framework project and ported over only the dispatcher and model pieces from Dynamic Website. Thus, the Web Framework itself can build and remains lightweight. It produces a fairly small JAR file.

Finally, we retained within the Dynamic Website project all of the bits that make up the user interface. Thus, Dynamic Website will continue into the future. It will be one of many applications that utilize Web Framework 3.0.

Over the next few weeks, attention will shift to focus on Web Client 3.0 and the application of this framework toward Project Spaces, Document libraries, Activity tracking and group workspaces. Very cool stuff!

Stay tuned for more news!

Nancy Garrity: Community Update March, 2008

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:07:33 +0000

It’s been a busy time around the Alfresco community lately. One of the highlights of the past few weeks was our first technology BarCamp that we held on March 11th, the evening before our North America Community Meeting in San Jose, California.

Alfresco engineers and technical field staff spent a few hours with a small group of community members exchanging ideas, showing demos and talking about best practices over sandwiches and a couple of beers. We’re planning a similar event in Barcelona the evening before the European Community Meeting on April 21st.

You may have noticed several new projects pop up on the forge in the past month including Opsoro, short for OPen SOurce ROcks, an AJAX-based repository browser developed using web script technology. You’ll also find an Ingres/Alfresco bundle and a custom Alfresco action that sends a document as an attachment to an email message. All forge projects are open source, they are there for you to use in your business, to extend or to learn from.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed a submission to the Web Script Developer Challenge. We’ve received several entries many of which are both clever and have real business application. We’ll announce the winner of the first Apple iPod Touch on April 4th. The challenge will continue through July.

Don’t miss the first in our new series of developer-focused webinars. On April 3rd, Dr. Yong Qu, an Alfresco field technical engineer will talk about the Alfresco iPhone integration that he built.

Do you have ideas for future webinar topics, locations for local events or other community-focused activities? Email me!

Jeff Potts: Productively running multiple versions of Alfresco

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:04:30 +0000

How do you juggle multiple versions of Alfresco on your local machine? At any given time, I’ve got at least three versions running: The latest Enterprise release, the Enterprise head, and the Community head. If one or more active Optaros clients aren’t yet on the latest release, those older releases are running as well.

There’s always more than one way to skin a cat but here’s how I handle this problem. First, I want to use a single Tomcat instance, but I don’t want all of my Alfresco versions running at the same time. Second, I want to use the same MySQL instance running with version-specific databases to keep them separate. Third, I want separate, version-specific data directories.

The solution is to name your databases and all of your version specific directories with a naming convention, and then use shell scripts to delete and create soft links in the appropriate locations that point to the version specific directories. (If you are running Windows you can do symbolic links too–they are called Junctions).

In an Alfresco install there are four directories that you need to address:

The data directory
The web application directory
The shared extension directory
The virtualization server directory

Decide on a naming convention. For my databases, I use alfrescoXXn where XX is the version number and n is the network abbreviation (”c” for community, “e” for enterprise, etc.). So my database for 2.2 Enterprise would be alfresco22e. For directories, I use alfresco-X.X-nnnn. So, for example, the directories for Alfresco 2.2 Enterprise would be:

/home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-2.2-enterprise/data
/home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-2.2-enterprise/webapp
/home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-2.2-enterprise/extension
/home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-2.2-enterprise/virtual

When I want to switch between versions, I just call a shell script with the version as the argument. It takes care of deleting the existing links and creating the new:

echo Switching to $1... echo Switching webapp… rm $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/alfresco ln -s /home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-$1/webapp $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/alfresco echo Switching extension directory… rm $TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension ln -s /home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-$1/extension $TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension echo Clearing Tomcat work directory… rm -rf $TOMCAT_HOME/work/Catalina/localhost/alfresco echo Clearing Tomcat temp directory… rm -rf $TOMCAT_HOME/temp/* echo Switching virtual tomcat directory… rm $VIRTUAL_TOMCAT_HOME ln -s /home/jpotts/alfresco/alfresco-$1/virtual $VIRTUAL_TOMCAT_HOME

Note that in this set up, the data directory and the Alfresco database don’t have to be dealt with directly because they are referenced by the custom-repository.properties file residing in the version-specific extension directory.

While you’re at it, why not make it easier to clear out the repository? Set up a “clean” script that cleans out your data directory and then runs the db_remove and db_setup SQL scripts. Remember that you’ll either need version specific copies of these scripts or you’ll need to modify them to accept the version-specific database as an argument.

With this setup in place, you can set up new versions, switch between versions, and start over with a clean repo quickly and easily.

Russ Danner: Repository

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:34:00 +0000

During OSBC I was able to catch up with a number of fellow Alfresco customers. All of us are eager to gain a better understanding of how Alfresco will proceed with its repository harmonization. During the Alfresco Community in New York repository harmonization was a major theme during the Ask the Experts session. Clearly it's an important area of concern for customers.

Alfresco's road map on the wiki states the following priorities for 2008

New and enhanced team and enterprise collaboration services

Publishing and management services for dynamic, Web 2.0-enabled websites

Web client usability

Scalability, performance, and enterprise-readiness

Standards

It's difficult to tell if repository harmonization is included in these initiatives or not. Clearly it is not spelled out as a explicit initiative unto its own. I am looking forward to the MuSCoW roadmap / release schedule we were told about at during the User Meetup in San Jose. MuSCow stands for Must do, Should do, Could do, Won't Do.

I had a thought today that I need to follow up on. We have been talking about "Repository Harmonization." I, for some reason assumed this meant that the two repositories will be consolidated in to a single solution, taking the best features and capabilities from each. This is a probably a question of semantics -- but I got to thinking today: "harmonization" is not by definition consolidation. Harmonization implies two or more entities acting in harmony (for example two guitar string vibrating at agreeable [very technical -- I know] frequencies.) I am still under the impression that harmonization means consolidation but I want to follow up and make sure. Clearly the combined feature set is important to the customers that I've had the fortune to speak with.

Russ Danner: Acquisition Motivation and Customer Interests

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:36:00 +0000

At OSBC this year a panel discussion was added to the agenda called “Can Open Source Communities Survive Mergers / Acquisitions?” The panel was moderated by Robin Vasan, and included representatives from MySQL, Zend, SleepyCat, and Jboss. This was one of the best talks I was able to attend.

Zack Urlocker of MySQL (now Sun Microsystems) said something that resonated with me. He said when they [MySQL] were acquired by Sun it was because they saw Sun as an environment where they could grow MySQL at an accelerated pace. MySQL wasn’t simply working towards an “exit." They were/are building a big, customer focused software company and this exit was the next logical step.

I really appreciated this concept. I don’t care for the idea of companies who like the beef industry, which, raises cattle for the harvest (slaughter); build businesses just to be sold. The motivation in my opinion is wrong. I understand the pure business justification. This course of action makes perfect sense for the entrepreneur but I question the value and effect it has on the customer.

Customers want the focus on their interests. When it comes to companies investing in software; they want to know that the company is A: focused on the product and it’s ability to meet customer needs, and B: the company is going to be around for a good long while. An open source company building itself simply to be bought; that is, a company which has the primary objective of reaching an exit is in my opinion at serious risk of accomplishing neither because the motivation directs the focus elsewhere.

Acquisition may be the right move but I think the motive behind getting to that point is of great importance. In general I think exits aught to be thought of as new beginnings on sronger footing. When exits are simply exits, it is a red flag for the customer. Customers, Customers, Customers – this is what matters.

Russ Danner: Open Source and "Commerical Interests"

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:51:00 +0000

Lorenzo E. Danielsson has an interesting blog post here, which responds to this post. I wrote the post on the 26th and later edited out some of the things I thought were off topic which was:

Open Source companies aught to be able to grow their business to the scale of organizations like Microsoft. On the way there we stand to learn some things from companies like Microsoft where they have (very limited at the moment) experience with going open. Is it good or bad for society when companies get this large? IMO, it depends -- transparency matters at scale.

In fairness to Lorenzo and Alfresco I need to make clear a few things and also make available the text, which Lorenzo has commented on. I stand behind what I’ve said; I just didn’t think it helped the post in terms of staying on topic.

First. I don’t work for Alfresco. I’m a community member. My opinions are my own.

I absolutely believe that open source has the potential to create both economic and vast social benefit. Apache, Eclipse, Linux for example have created a feedback in the economic/social ecosystem that without open source simply would not exist. The kind of productivity that free and open source software produces is very special and very important. It has the power to change the world and it is doing so.

I like many have trepidation with large amounts of centralized power but this is because “absolute power corrupts absolutely. “ We can't count of the benevolence of individuals or organizations because it is almost always temporal. In our industry IBM, Microsoft, Google have all struggled or continue to struggle to maintain the balance of scale and public perception. Be transparent, focus on the customer.

To address some of Lorenzo’s points:

Lorenzo commented on this text I edited out the other evening:

Open Source is not about the bits, it’s not about the community, and it’s not about licenses. It’s about a better way to do business (read: make money via serving customers.) Have you read the Clue Train Manifesto? Does it sound familiar? They don’t have any bits, community or licenses. They only have a model based on the fact that A: the world is massively connected, B: the fact that customers are as informed and in some cases better informed than vendors and C: the fact that the market now has the capability and the expectation to engage in bi-directional or n-directional conversation with vendors and other customers. They have a model that sounds a whole lot like open source without all the distracting implementation details.

Lorenzo responds:
It’s not about community, because community implies those ungrateful masses who are supposed to serve the elites. The elites have built up a system called wage slavery which is how things are supposed to be done. Community is the start of dangerous dissent against the ruling order. Never mind that those communities wrote the software. Once the labor is done, business can take over.

The System that is Open Source would not survive on community alone. “It’s not about community” is meant to say that open source is not a hierarchy of components but a network and that community alone does not make open source what it is. Community is a very important aspect of Open Source – however it IS NOT what open source IS. Community is a significant node in the network in that it can push both negative (regulating) and positive (re-enforcing) feedback on to the network. I like Lorenzo believe that the community should be strong via its rights (example: right to fork, right to vote on direction) and diverse.

Lorenzo further commented on this text I edited out the other evening:

The software industry has historically been abusive to its customers. Open Source promises to focus on the customer and that inclusive conversation. So source code, it turns out, is in a big way merely the olive branch: a statement of commitment to the claims we make. Don’t believe me? You probably use MySql or Apache. Do you care about the source code? Almost none of us do. I would be sorely upset if I found my development staff was hacking MySql code. I want my developers in the community, I want them to contribute but source code has very little to do with anything on the business side. I do care that MySql is open source. It has nothing to do with access to the source code per se. That olive branch makes it very clear that MySQL has to focus on creating value through service – they cannot abuse their customers or community.

Lorenzo responds:

So, in summary, Russ Danner sees in open source the possibility for big business to take the work of various open source communities and use it to make huge profits. The communities themselves are, as we have seen, irrelevant. Any claims they make equally so (remember, licenses are irrelevant). So Russ sees open source as yet another way for the rich to bleed to poor. And that is good.

He goes on to say:

“I would be sorely upset if I found my development staff was hacking MySql code.”

I guess development staff means “wage slaves”. What does sorely upset mean? That you deny your developers the freedom to work on what they want to work on? Does it mean that the right to choose only exists for the capitalist class, the bosses? If one of your developers worked on MySQL code on his free time, would you punish him or her for that? What if the changes the developer made to MySQL was beneficial to Alfresco in some way, would that developer be credited for that? Or still punished for their insubordination against the elite way?

But could the open source movement work for social change? Well, not in isolation. But it can play a part. One must be careful not to see all open source users or open source developers as a part of a coherent whole. The only thing that connects us all is the fact that we work on or with software that fits the criteria of being called open source or free software. Otherwise you have the full spectrum of political beliefs, including Russ Danner’s capitalist ones, or the outright racist viewpoints of Eric S. Raymond.

Context is important here and I failed to provide that in what I said. If my developers want to work on MySQL or other open source software (that is contextual [rather than core] to my business) on their own time – more power to them. When it comes to what they work on at work? It’s important that what they work on serves the organization. I’m not saying every task must be direct. I spend a lot of time in the Alfresco community and yes.. my employer pays for it, and yes.. that is the right thing for them to do because its an investment in the employee (me) and the technologies they rely on (Alfresco.) That said… If we were to spend our time developing the core components of Alfresco we wouldn’t be serving the core needs of our business and that is wrong. We may be able to help and we are certainly willing but we do need to consider where we focus development. I believe Alfresco should look for community partnership in core development, but I also believe that it will be rare that they find it. Development is expensive business and both sides must find ways to leverage each other in a fashion, which is symbiotic.

I believe open source and business are important partners. Open Source and in general the ideas put forward in Clue Train bring balance to the system by empowering the members of the market with a voice and a recognized lion share of the power. It rightly positions the companies in a position of service rather than in a position of supreme power with the potential for the kind of abuse that is associated there. I have become a fan of commercial open source companies who use dual licensing and the GPL. It clearly states code or cash is the price for this software. This provides both the economic and social feedback effects to come to play more fully. Should people be compensated for their work? Yes, without a doubt in my mind. Should we have a social conscious? Yes Absolutely. I think that open source is capable of accomplishing both. Commercial interests do not have to be void of social interests. I believe in strong leaders who see social interests as commercial interests hence the Peter Drucker quote.

Lorenzo, thanks for your response. I will spend some more time thinking about what you have written.

Russ Danner: Open Source - Growing Up

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:52:00 +0000

As far as I am concerned, OSBC is the most important conference of the year for those who are looking to use open source to create leverage for their business. If you were not able to attend this year … know that you missed out and you should make an effort to get to next years event; it’s the week of March 10th: plan accordingly. :-) For those that couldn’t attend, you can find a lot of analysis here on Matt Asay’s Blog, The Open Road. There were many interesting, insightful, and practical keynotes and sessions over the course of the two-day event. Of particular note: R0ml Leftowitz’s talk on IT: Forget The Factory, Enterprise IT is a Deli, all keynotes/footnote addresses, the panel on open source acquisition, and several of the panel discussion where customers were able to give real world feedback on their experience implementing Open Source. As a customer trying to walk in their shoes the customer centric sessions and keynotes are extremely helpful.

I am very grateful for OSBC, the folks who put it together and for those who take time to speak and attend – it’s simply an invaluable opportunity to learn from and interact with the brilliant folks who are changing the face of the software industry as we know it.

Every OSBC has had a transformative effect on my thinking concerning open source and this year is no exception. However, this year the thinking is of a much different nature than in years past and I’m still trying to digest and understand it. It’s probably not the best idea to blog until I have come to terms more fully with my thoughts but what the heck… what fun would that be?

This year I attended a talk titled “What can Open Source learn from Microsoft and the proprietary world.” Moderator Steven Walli (Consultant), Jean Barmash (Alfresco), Neelan Choski (SpringSource), Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation) and Sam Ramji (Microsoft). I have to admit I was pretty excited for this talk. Steven Walli has a fantastic way of cutting through the spin and getting to the point. Sam is Director of Open Source and Linux Strategy at Microsoft. Jim is Executive Director at the Linux Foundation and Jean and Neelan are members of highly successful, fast growing commercial open source organizations. What a topic! What a line up!

Does Open Source have something to learn from Microsoft? My hypothesis? You better believe it! Microsoft’s business is orders of magnitude larger than the entire open source market as a whole at the moment. The open source industry is trying to institute open source from the bottom up. If Microsoft were to open up, it would have to do so from the top down. Small groups inside Microsoft may favor open source but real, timely change is going to take someone with a title that includes the words: “Director” or “EVP” and “open source” and a top-level management commitment. It takes control of the helm to effectively turn an aircraft carrier.

I’m not familiar with Sam Ramji (Microsoft Corp, Directory of Open Source and Linux Strategy) or his work – I’m not familiar with what kind of strategy he is responsible for concerning open source or Linux in his role at Microsoft. From the open source perspective, is his position used for good or evil? Is Sam a voice for change or is he a “Ring Wraith” carrying out the dark work Mt Doom. To be perfectly clear, I have no idea – I still don’t know for sure. I tried to attend the session with an open mind and with hopeful expectations that Microsoft might indeed be recognizing some advantages in opening up and thus they have someone like Sam to help champion and ultimately apply some of open source’s principals to improve their business.

Is shared source open source? I wouldn’t call it open source but they do have an OSI approved license. Does Microsoft’s brand of open satisfy the open source community?
From what I can tell: not at all. However, it is a start – at least that is how I view it.

Sam seemed to be coming from the perspective that Microsoft does in fact see some advantages in the open way. My conclusion? “Not a Ring Wraith.”

The panel discussion was good and all of the panelists gave strong presentations and good information. However, there was, in my opinion, minimal discussion on What Open Source can learn from Microsoft and the proprietary world. Instead, there was a lot of information, particularly from the open source side on how Open Source currently does it. It was all good information but I left disappointed.

I felt we had missed a golden opportunity to cross-examine Microsoft and the gentleman who seemed to be trying to facilitate some openness in the giant. We (Open Source) did a really good job of talking about and in some cases defending open source and a rather poor job of searching and listening. Sam’s perspective is different from “ours”, his problems are different and he’s working at the scale we all want to achieve (assuming you are a capitalist pig like me.) Shame on us. We should have made Sam work hard, really hard during this session. We don’t have to justify the existence of Open Source or the benefits of its models. The fact that Microsoft via Sam and Brad Smith were present at OSBC already demonstrates this for us. Further, do we honestly believe our current way of operating scales up to Microsoft-like size without modification – it hasn’t demonstrated that it can so far? Let’s not get lazy – even if we think we have the answers, we must continue to ask the questions over and over, again and again. “The answers change much more often than the questions.” -- Peter Drucker.

The open source community gets so worked up about how open Microsoft is or isn’t. I’d be willing to say we’re not going to be satisfied (if we even could be) with anything less than Microsoft’s full and unconditional surrender to our terms of openness.

What I think is interesting, and what I think you might find interesting if you really pay attention at an event like OSBC is that while everyone agrees there is tremendous value in Open Source, there is really no consensus on where exactly it is. Many point to code, community, licenses, cost savings, distribution etc. We understand to a large degree the overall effects of the system but we often get caught up in the details or are ignorant of how they work together to produce the effects that they do. What I’m saying is that even within the community many are still working to understand the dynamics of open. Given that, we’re not exactly in a strong position to say why it is that Microsoft or anyone else should be so open or just how open they should be. Opening up is almost a “personal” journey that has to be tailored to each organization that embarks on it. Openness is leverage but that has to be demonstrated and learned. Few are willing to take leaps of faith. Many are carrying so much legal, culture and other legacy baggage that the journey is slow, complicated and encumbered.

I'm not sure we are yet in a position to be telling anyone how it should be. We are in a position to demonstrate some real customer value -- but -- we clearly have more to learn and demonstrate. By our fruits not by our rhetoric..

Redhat is the crown jewel of Open Source but it’s only doing 500 Million a year. Compared to Microsoft, Redhat has some growing to do. Does Redhat want to scale to Microsoft size – I really hope so. I believe that open source delivers more value per dollar than the alternatives and at Microsoft’s scale that would constitute a huge amount of value. We’re never going to get there unless we think and ultimately operate at that scale – which means learning from those who are already there. It strikes me as sad and ironic that the open source community can sometimes be so closed-minded.

The Gang: Building Alfresco Extensions in About an Hour

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:15:51 +0000

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!

Luis Sala: Google OneBox Module for Alfresco

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:03:14 +0000

As part of a “Built in 60” project, I recently developed a Google OneBox module for the Google Search Appliance using a simple Web Script and an XSL stylesheet. I’ll be posting the code within the next few weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy the following screenshots:

Luis Sala: “Built in 60″ - Build Alfresco Extensions in About an Hour

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:01:48 +0000

As some of you may know, we recently celebrated Alfresco’s Community Conference in San Jose, California and are ramping up for another one in Barcelona, Spain at the end of April. What you might not know is that we also held a more “intimate” three-hour technical session the night before. We kept this event deliberately small so as to ensure that every attendee could hear and be heard. As part of this session, I introduced an Alfresco “developer challenge” I call “Built in 60″. The idea is to conceive and implement simple Alfresco extensions in roughly an hour (not a hard limit, but rather a guideline to limit scope). The response by my team and the attendees was quite encouraging. As part of this initiative, my fellow Alfresco colleagues implemented a few “Built in 60″ projects including: Web Script-based Wiki GroovyBean-based Root Scoped Objects for JavaScript iPhone UI for Alfresco Workflow Inspector Apple Dashboard Gadget We’ll be posting code and implementation details in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, checkout the following presentation which outlines these projects:

Jean Barmash: Value of Alfresco Subscription

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:51:35 +0000

From my limited (I am not directly involved with sales) experience, it seems like in the past we put a lot of emphasis on support as being the value derived from subscription. I know that we are working to add Network to the list of offering, but I believe this is not enough. We are hiding the value we truly provide to our customers, or at least I believe there is an opportunity to set the expectations differently from the very start of the sales process.

Currently, customers equate their subscription with paying for support. I heard multiple people say and wholeheartedly agree that we need to change this. I think part of the answer is with how we position the subscription. We need to disconnect the two as much as possible in customer’s mind.

Value Alfresco Provides
Let’s think about the value Alfresco as a company provides. From the inception of the company, we conceived, built the product, tested it, hardened it, marketed it and sold it. All of these activities ultimately benefit the customer. The cost of these services is amortized in the value of subscription. I think we should be upfront with the customers and explain that this is what we are offering. Support is only a component of the value we provide around the open source software platform.

Subscription = Amortization of Software Creation + Services
We should be very careful to position that support is a small COMPONENT of subscription, especially since this has the advantage of being true J. Our subscription really amortizes all the costs related to the product :

Engineering / Improving the platform going forward.
Product Management to evolve platform based on customer’s needs.
Bug Fixes / Patches to fix issues
Hardened Version of the Product – QA to make sure the platform is stable out of the gate.
Design / Usability.
Sales (in other companies, cost of sale is amortized into license, in ours - into subscription)
Training development / delivery services
Partnership Activities / Maintaining an ecosystem of services organizations
Having good management to make sure we don’t go out of business.
Limited consulting capability to mentor and enable customers

To expand a bit on our engineering team. Our core team, all employed by Alfresco, are people with over hundred combined years of experience in the ECM industry, and other people working here are also experts in their respective fields.

Like I wrote above, all of the above is AMORTIZED in the price of the subscription. This holds true even as we are opening up to receive more community contributions – Alfresco the company would still provide all the above functions to enhance the community contributions and provide these services around the community version. On top of all of the above, with a subscription customers get:

Support - various response levels, Gold and Platinum.
Alfresco Network - collection of services and best practices to enable you to increase the chances of success around implementation. Coming soon…
Indemnification
Partners - Ecosystem of 120 SI Partners worldwide. Partners are trained and experienced in Alfresco and stand ready to help customers with their implementations.
Account Executives - “one throat to choke” in case other parts of organization are underperforming. This is true as long as they follow up on the sales and work towards successful implementations.

Around renewal time, we can remind customers of all the components of the subscription, and that they lose all that if they don’t renew.

Implications of Open Source / Community Version
I fully understand that the fact that a free version exists means the customers have a choice to switch to that, and some will invariably will. I think this is healthy to an extent, and serves as an indicator of the quality of our product. From our perspective, we need to make sure we provide as much value and have multiple capabilities to provide services to customers. It also means that we need to excel in all the services we provide, which we would as any type of company, open source or not.

An important consideration for the above is to disconnect the community version (where we don’t provide the services mentioned above, at least not nearly to the same extent) from the enterprise version of the product. I believe our current split between the versions (with Community being Labs version) should be effective. We need to strive to make similar distinction around the other services we offer.

Support= Customer Satisfaction?
If we continue to sell support as the main thing customers pay for, then we essentially are putting the customer satisfaction burden on support alone. No matter how good the support organization can be, this is too much to ask them. If our sales guys do too good of job and overload support with calls, customer satisfaction suffers. If the QA guys miss some bugs, support is also overloaded. If the sales engineers overpromise something, support suffers. Once again, all components of the company should combine to deliver value around the subscription that we sell.

Conclusion
The more we reinforce the message that subscription does not equal support only, I believe the more likely we will get more renewals and more sales in the first place. If we successfully position support as being a small part of the subscription, even if at times a specific customer is unhappy with support, we can point out that this is a part of the value of subscription, not all the value. The key is to reinforce the message both pre-sale and post-sale.

Your thoughts?

Yong Qu: iAlfresco Part one - iPhone Navigator

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:32:27 +0000

I built a simple yet very useful Alfresco navigator for iPhone. In nutshell, it is an iPhone-friendly web client. This navigator is backed by three webscripts ( one for DM space/doc navigation, one for WCM navigation and one for search) and leverages open source iUI package to provide looking-n-feel. The performance of the navigator is pretty good on iPhone (with its slow Edge network) since the script basically shows different branch of a single DOM tree based on where you are and when you navigate down to a new space or web project directory it will add the new nodes to the tree.

The navigator gives you following capabilities

Navigate Spaces and Docs
Display topics/posts attached to the docs.
Preview Images, PDFs etc.
Navigate Web Projects
Preview Web Sites
Search

To install the package on your Alfresco, simply follow following steps

Unzip dist/iui.zip to {your tomcat directory}/webapps/alfresco/scripts
Import dist/iphone-navigator.zip to your alfresco installation and put it under Data Dictionary/Web Scripts Extensions
Refresh webscripts or restart Alfresco.
Test the navigator

Or you can check out the flash.

Jeff Potts: Alfresco pledges to open community by 3.0

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:00:44 +0000

At the Alfresco Community Conference in San Jose Wednesday, Kevin Cochrane and John Newton promised to have a process in place to let non-Alfresco employees become committers to the Alfresco Community code line. The pledge, which many in the community may find surprising because up until this point, Alfresco has operated as a “closed community”, came in response to my question during the “Ask an Expert” session about the possibility of opening up. Kevin responded, “It’s coming with 3.0″, to which John added, “We want to make it easier for developers in the community to contribute to the product. We want to remove the bureaucracy that’s there. The more the merrier.”

Committers will have to assign over copyright and make guarantees that the code they contribute is theirs to give. According to John, this assignment of rights may be difficult for developers working for certain types of organizations, particularly those in government agencies, but Alfresco is working on a solution.

Jeff Potts: Notes on the Alfresco Community Conference in San Jose

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:56:27 +0000

More than 150 customers, partners, and prospects attended the Alfresco Community Conference in San Jose yesterday. There was a BarCamp the night before attended by almost 30 people. Alfresco capped attendance for both the Community Conference and the BarCamp.

Opening Keynotes

During the opening keynotes, Alfresco CEO John Powell and CTO John Newton went through their “state of the ECM market” presentations which attendees to the New York conference earlier in the year have already seen, for the most part. The theme is essentially that the old notion of ECM is dead, basic content services will bring ECM to the masses, and web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 needs to be woven throughout. Alfresco sees itself as being perfectly positioned for the transition to this new, more innovative flavor of ECM. They position themselves as being more front office/extranet/internet savvy than Documentum, Filenet, or OpenText, more back office than Vignette, Interwoven, or Drupal, and more enterprise than Sharepoint.

Adobe Share

For the first time that I know of, Adobe talked publicly about the technology behind their online document sharing service currently in beta. The Alfresco-backed service, share.adobe.com, offers anyone a Flex-based user interface for storing, transforming, and sharing documents. It essentially combines three online document-related services: Document Center (protect PDFs and Office documents), Create PDF (online service for creating PDFs), and pdf2text@adobe.com (email-based service for converting PDF to text). It then adds 1 GB of free storage for shared documents.

Any documents shared on the site are stored in Alfresco. After initial storage, several back-end services are executed including a virus scan, conversion to PDF, conversion to Flash, and the creation of thumbnails.

The Flex-based front-end talks to Flex DS which talks to Alfresco via REST. While in beta, the system is running on an active-passive cluster. To scale to the anticipated volume of millions of users and billions of documents, Adobe is going to have to scale both horizontally and vertically. Details on exactly how they plan to do this were not discussed.

Up-coming releases

2.9 Enterprise (Q2 2008) — This is the first I’ve heard of an Enterprise release for 2.9. I’m not sure if this is real or not.
3.0 Community (Early August)
3.0 Enterprise (Early October)
3.1 (End 2008?)
3.5/4.0 (Mid-2009)

Check the Alfresco wiki for official timelines. All 3.0 development tasks are going to be entered into Jira under a project called “Slingshot” so if you’re wondering what’s in the new release, check there. At the time of this writing I couldn’t find any reference to Slingshot.

Web client 3.0: No longer 100% Flex

One 3.0 change that deserves attention is the new web client. Earlier in the year the plan had been to build it entirely on Adobe Flex. The new plan is to build the client entirely on web scripts with strategic use of Flex-based components where it makes sense. That’s right–no more JavaServer Faces. (Alfresco engineers say JSF just kept getting in the way).

Another interesting aspect of the new web client is the plan to make it an Alfresco WCM-managed web site. That means web client customizations would be handled like changes to any other web site. The new web client could also be used as an example of how to build your own dynamic web site on top of Alfresco’s REST interface. Custom solutions could optionally leverage Alfresco components as needed alongside custom components built on web scripts. The “classic” web client will continue to live for at least two years after 3.0.

An important side note to this change is that with 3.0, the web client and the repository no longer run in the same process. The repository will continue to be a web app deployed to a servlet container, but it won’t be coupled with the web client. They will be two separate web apps.

Alfresco’s Moves to the Front-End: Alfresco Dynamic Web Site

The other big buzz was around the new Alfresco Dynamic Web Site. In a nutshell, this gives Alfresco WCM something it has lacked, particularly when compared to offerings from folks like Vignette or Drupal: a front-end presentation framework.

Currently when you install Alfresco WCM you get just about everything you need to manage a web site but you don’t get a web site or any tools to help you build the web site. Alfresco’s Dynamic Web Site is an attempt to provide a sample site, a set of components, and tools for WYSIWYG editing of the web site. It makes more sense when you see it, but imagine previewing a web site and then dragging and dropping components, web content, and images from a tree view of your repository onto regions of a web page and you’ll have some idea of what this is.

Under this model, Alfresco hopes that web script-based components will flourish into a library of publically-shared modules a la Drupal or Sharepoint’s web parts. Web scripts are built with JavaScript (or Java) and Freemarker which is a much simpler (and open) development model than that of Microsoft’s web parts.

Alfresco for the iPhone

Yet another good example of the power of web scripts was Yong Qu’s iPhone demo. Using Apple’s iPhone SDK and development tools, Yong built an interface to Alfresco for the iPhone. Using an online iPhone emulator, he showed how he could browse the repository, view documents and images, and search all through the slick iPhone interface. He tied that in to Alfresco’s new SMTP capability by taking a picture of the audience with his real iPhone, sending it to his Alfresco server via email, and then using the iPhone emulator to search the repository for the newly-added picture. The interface to Alfresco was based on three web scripts–one that handled browsing the DM repository, one that handled browsing the AVM repository, and one that handled search.

[Updated 2.9 Enterprise date which I had incorrectly listed as 2007]

Russ Danner: San Jose : Alfresco Community Summit

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:46:00 +0000

Today Alfresco held a community summit & bar camp in San Jose, Ca. In my opinion this was the most valuable Alfresco event to date. Great Job guys.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend in person but was able to catch most of the event on line.

The event was one highlight after another. All of the speakers did really well and every presentation had something to offer. To get the presentations log on to the Alfresco content community (http://hosted4.alfresco.com/alfresco/faces/jsp/login.jsp)

John Newton (Alfresco CTO and Chairman) began by describing at a high level, the vision for Alfresco, both as a technology and as a player in the market. Alfresco is working hard to build an open source based platform for Social Computing. Social Computing is all about collaboration via social media tools both in and outside the firewall. Social computing is a growing concern in the enterprise as new generations of workforce are hired on. Each generation is more comfortable with the internet and its ever growing brand of social tools (including wikis, blogs, and platforms for social networking like Facebook and MySpace) than the generation before it. These employees are used to these tools and expect them to be available regardless of where they are working from. IT on the other hand is often responsible for security and compliance / regulatory concerns. Many IT shops initially push back on these social media tools because they lack the enterprise features that meet the requirements mandated by the regulatory groups (SOX etc.) As we move forward in this brave new world where the lines between inside and outside the firewall are blurred we'll need a platform that delivers our social tools outside our corporate walls while maintaining our ability to meet our enterprise requirements.

John explained with great clarity that in today's market there are no products with exception to Microsoft Share Point and Alfresco that fill this space. Most other relevant vendors are far too specialized or are fragmented along diverse product lines. John explained that while Share Point is able to operate in the space, it is not an ideal platform for the job and that it also comes at the high price of end-to-end vendor lock-in with Microsoft technologies. Alfresco on the other hand has been designed from the ground up on open technology specifically to fill this space.

Additionally, John spoke about plans within Alfresco to increase the level of transparency and community involvement with respect to the product road map. Alfresco plans to improve on accuracy and management of customer expectations with regard to the content and timing of releases. Alfresco has decided that delivering on time is priority #1 with respect to releases. The saying goes "on time, on budget, or at quality; pick two." In this case, quality and completeness will take a back seat to on time delivery. Concerned?! Put your mind at ease -- this makes a lot of sense. Enterprises require predictability. An inability to plan can often be crippling to a project. Knowing exactly when the next release of Alfresco will be available is absolutely critical to a healthy relationship between Alfresco and "The enterprise." It's important to know that when the product ships it will have what you need in it. Alfresco is taking steps to increase this awareness as well. They have decided to publicly prioritize the work they are and the work they are not planning on doing. This system is known as the MoSCoW system. MoSCoW stands for Must do, Should do, Could do, and Won't do. This is a wonderful addition to the product/project roadmap. Community members will know exactly when the release will take place and what they can reasonably be able to expect to be in it. Similarly you will find a list of items Alfresco "Won't do." It is just as important to understand where we are not going as it is to understand where we plan to be in the future. I am looking forward to this new level of clarity and transparency in the the road map.

From a technical perspective, web scripts continue to take center stage. Jeff Potts, Optaros principal ECM architect and Alfresco's contributor of the year gave a brief overview of Webscripts. A Web Script is the ability in Alfresco to create a RESTful service in Alfresco. Building a webscript is a really powerful and easy to do. You don't have to be a hard core programmer to do amazing things with Webscripts. If you can handle a (very) little XML, javascript and freemarker you are all set. Javascript is a really light and very easy programming language used to describe business logic, Free Marker is a simple template languag, and XML is used to describe and "bind" the service to the system.

After Jeff's introduction we saw some fantastic examples from customers, service integrators and Alfresco employees of what can be accomplished with a simple webscripts containing a few lines of "code."

Also worth mentioning is that Alfresco is currently hosting a Webscripts competition. You can find out more about it here: http://www.alfresco.com/partners/programme/webscripts/
Everyone who submits a valid web script will receive a limited edition Alfresco T-shirt. Our first place winner will receive an Apple iPod 16 GB Touch, the winner will be announced on April 4th, 2008.

For me the apex of the Webscript wonderment was the demonstration of the Dynamic website framework developed in partnership with the Alfresco sales engineers, the community and the product development team. Michael Uzquiano of Alfresco led a entertaining tour of the framework, demonstrating how simple it was to edit a dynamic website driven by Alfresco. One of the best ways to make changes to a website is to find the page and component you need to edit on your site and simply edit it directly. The website framework allows you to do just that. The framework supports the ability to enter edit mode anywhere on the site, at which point you are able to see how the page has been partitioned in to components. From that point you can add, remove or edit the individual components. All of this works seamlessly with the rest of the Alfresco WCM capabilities including sandboxing and the ability to promote / deploy your website to different environments (staging, live etc.) This is really exciting work. Michael said that we can expect to see the work he demonstrated in the the approximately a month.

Again I want to thank everyone who made this event possible -- it really was terrific!

Jeff Potts: Trouble with Alfresco? Console yourself

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:18:46 +0000

Everyone who has spent more than 10 minutes with Alfresco is familiar with Alfresco’s Admin Console. The node browser is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting, but it is conspicuously located as a link on the Admin Console. There are a few other consoles that you can use to help troubleshoot or manage the repository, but you have to know where to look.

What: Workflow Console
Where: http://localhost:8080/alfresco/faces/jsp/admin/workflow-console.jsp
Use: Deploy, un-deploy, and delete workflows. Inspect workflow metadata. Complete a task that’s become stuck for some reason.

What: AVM Console
Where: http://localhost:8080/alfresco/faces/jsp/admin/avm-console.jsp
Use: List stores, create stores, delete stores, create directories and branches, create snapshots, create new nodes. Basically your one-stop shop for working with the AVM Store. If one model is ever chosen over the other, it is likely to be the AVM Store, so this is tool will become even more useful in the future.

2.9 Community adds a couple of new consoles…

What: Repository Admin Console
Where: http://localhost:8080/alfresco/faces/jsp/admin/repoadmin-console.jsp
Use: Deploy, activate, and de-activate content models. If you are using dynamic data models, you’ll need this. See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Dynamic_Models for more details.

What: Web Client Config Console
Where: http://localhost:8080/alfresco/faces/jsp/admin/webclientconfig-console.jsp
Use: Reload the web client configuration. Handy when placing web-client-config-custom.xml in the repository rather on the file system. See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Dynamic_Models for more details.

Consoles are certainly helpful, but log files and debuggers are also essential. Tweak log4j.properties by setting various loggers to “debug” depending on where it is you are having trouble. The log4j.properties file resides in <ALFRESCO WEB ROOT>/WEB-INF/classes. For JavaScript specifically, there’s a Rhino JavaScript Debugger you can enable, but I haven’t found much use for it. In any case, to turn it on, in log4j.properties, change this logger to “on”:

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.repo.jscript.AlfrescoRhinoScriptDebugger=off

Last, connecting the Eclipse debugger to your running instance of Tomcat is often very helpful. It allows you to step through Alfresco source code to your heart’s content. (Try that with Sharepoint!) There are a few ways to do this, but the way I do it is:

Set an environment variable called JPDA_ADDRESS to 8000 and one called JPDA_TRANSPORT to dt_socket.
Change the last line of Tomcat’s startup.sh to look like: exec “$PRGDIR”/”$EXECUTABLE” jpda start “$@”
Create and start a new Remote Java Application configuration in the Eclipse Debug dialog.
Set some breakpoints, hit the web client with a web browser and get to stepping.

With the help of the consoles, the logs, and the source, you’ll be successfully hacking Alfresco in no time.

Jeff Potts: Is Alfresco the “near beer” of open source?

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:45:03 +0000

I grew up in Oklahoma. For my international readers (I have quite a few), Oklahoma is in the central US, is quite beautiful, and is often called the “belt buckle” of the “bible belt”. This last characteristic gives way to some quite asinine laws, one of which is that beer sold in Oklahoma grocery stores must no more than 3.2% alcohol. As a kid I remember people ridiculing Oklahoma’s “near beer” to my father who would inevitably retort, “The 3.2 restriction is by weight while liquor stores measure by volume so it’s not a big deal.” I know–it always sounded lame to me too, but he’s a mathematician. (For details on the math, look here).

One of the criticisms of Alfresco by hardcore open source types is that it isn’t really open source. Like my home state’s beer, it’s almost open source. What does this mean? Certainly, the reasons I cited as to why clients choose open source (fit, standards, source code, transparency) hold true for Alfresco (See this post). But there’s a characteristic of “true” open source projects that’s missing for Alfresco that may not be as high on clients’ care-abouts, but is important to those of us in the community and that is this: In the current Alfresco model, none of us can ever be a committer. Yes, you can contribute patches and enhancements by opening a Jira ticket, but you’ve got to be an employee to be able to write to the SVN repository.

In the early days of Alfresco, this was more defensible than it is now–the code lines were the same, the product was still maturing, and, most importantly, Alfresco needed to protect its interests. Alfresco didn’t necessarily have time to let the community take the product wherever it wanted to. Instead, it needed to establish a critical mass, get things pointed in the right direction, and get some maintenance subscriptions flowing. Unlike other open source projects that start altruistically, Alfresco was a commercial enterprise from the start and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

But now things have changed. There have been over 1 million downloads. There are tens of thousands of registered members of the community. The Community and Enterprise code lines have been separated. Why not give up some of the control of the Community edition to the, uh, community? Alfresco is still a small company with limited resources. Couldn’t a fraction of those thousands of registered developers be enlisted to help?

Alfresco often compares its model to that of Fedora/RHEL and JBoss.org/JBoss.com which is a good way to illustrate the difference between Community and Enterprise from a development build versus enterprise-ready build perspective. But what about the development model? For those not familiar, the JBoss Development Process is roughly that all code starts in JBoss.org where it is available to early adopters. When it starts to look viable, it is pulled into JBoss.com, where it is scrubbed (maybe even recoded), integrated with the rest of the platform, tested, and productized. The key difference is that JBoss.org contributions include not just JBoss employees but others in the community who’ve earned the right to do so. Why can’t Alfresco work this way?

I imagine the answer comes down to resources and control. I concede that having the same engineers contributing to Community that must then pull the features forward into Enterprise is very efficient. Especially In the beginning, I could see how Alfresco engineers might have to spend more time integrating Community code with Enterprise code than they would have under the closed community policy. Surely that would improve over time, though.

Regarding control, I can understand that a commercial software company would feel inclined to tightly control the project’s growth and that an open community would be seen as a threat to that. But if the community takes the product down a substantially different path than the planned roadmap, wouldn’t that tell you something? And this wouldn’t be completely giving up control–Alfresco product management and Marketing would still be responsible for understanding what clients want, setting the road map, and owning the overall vision.

Maybe this is something we can get John and others to talk about next week in San Jose. Over a beer.

Jeff Potts: Know the way to San Jose?

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:30:18 +0000

I’ll be at the Alfresco Community Conference in San Jose next week. I’ll speak for a bit on the Endeca solution at the BarCamp the night before. The day of the conference I’ll be moderating the web scripts discussion. If you’re attending as well be sure to say hello.

Speaking of web scripts, hopefully you are busy hacking together an entry for Alfresco’s Web Scripts Developer Challenge. I’m one of the judges so if you stick a link to ecmarchitect.com somewhere in your code maybe I’ll give you bonus points.