wabson on alfresco

One of the things we’ve improved massively in the forthcoming 2.2 release of Alfresco is the configuration and management of deployment targets. I’ve been playing around with this the last couple of days, using VMware to provide a couple of target hosts for testing.

The file system deployer is really easy to set up - if you have Java already installed on the system then it’s just a matter of unzipping the deployer package, chmod’ing the shell script and firing it up. This starts a lightweight background Java process which listens via RMI for incoming connections from the authoring server.

I had a couple of issues myself, probably more related to my environment than anything else. Firstly I had to disable IPv6 on the target host, since it was causing the receiver to bind using only this and not using IPv4. Although I could telnet from my main OS and from other VMs onto port 44100, Alfresco was throwing back ConnectionRefusedExceptions, which I assume is some limitation of RMI.

To do this on the Debian VM, I updated the /etc/modprobe.d/aliases file, commenting out the following line:

alias net-pf-10 ipv6

and adding in the following replacement:

alias net-pf-10 off

This solved the first problem, but I then started getting errors indicating that Alfresco couldn’t connect to the host 127.0.1.1, seemingly something to do with the RMI server not picking up the proper IP address for the host. Rather than spend ages fiddling with the network settings, I simply added a -Djava.rmi.server.hostname argument to the command in deploy_start.sh, i.e.

nohup java -server -cp alfresco-deployment.jar:spring-2.0.2.jar:commons-logging-1.0.4.jar:alfresco-core.jar:jug.jar:. -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=192.168.60.130 org.alfresco.deployment.Main application-context.xml >deployment.log 2>&1 &

If your network configuration is sane and you’re not running under VMware you probably won’t need this at all. Obviously if you do then make sure you change your IP address to match that of the host.

Five minutes and three thousand assets later and apparently I had a successful deployment. Not bad.

Well done to John and John on the amazing article in the Guardian’s Technology section today. We made it onto page three!

Sadly the online version lacks the pretty pictures in the paper copy on my desk, but it’s a well-written piece, even if it does paint rather a depressing picture of Governmental take-up of open source in the UK.

We’re looking for a person to manage Community Relations within Alfresco as well as a Web Manager/Developer to join our growing team. These are two amazingly important roles within the company - and an excellent chance to make your mark on our web presence or the user community that it supports.

More details are in the Jobs section of the web site - drop us a line at careers at alfresco.com if you’re interested.

All blogs on blogs.alfresco.com have now been upgraded to the lastest shiny WordPress 2.0.11. Version 2.2.2 has also been installed and is available to anyone with an existing blog - but since this is a major upgrade I’ve left this one as an opt-in thing for now.

If you fancy trying out 2.2 and you already have a blog then drop me a mail.

Today we posted the details of two new openings that we have at Alfresco up on the web site. We’re looking for a web manager to take over my current role managing the main site and associated infrastructure, and other person to look after our various internal systems. Both great opportunities, but admittedly I’m kinda biased there.

If you’re interested, send us a copy of your CV and a short blurb to careers at alfresco dot com.

Congratulations to the guys at Canonical following today’s joint announcement with Dell. Having used Ubuntu myself since the first release over two-and-a-half years ago I know it’s a natural fit for Dell, but given their relationships with Red Hat and Novell I’m still slightly surprised they’re not offering Fedora or SUSE options as well.

That aside, this is great day not just for Linux but for anyone like me who doesn’t want their new computer preloaded with a bloated, proprietary, DRM-embracing hairball of an operating system like Vista but really can’t face the hassle of going the self-build route. I think I’ve worked out where the next PC is coming from.

I meant to write about this yesterday, but apparently trying to squeeze a week’s worth of work into four days prior to my day off today and fit in a trip to the gym meant I didn’t quite get round to doing so.

So Adobe have released Flex under the MPL, which is great news for the following reasons:

• Building rich web-based user interfaces sucks at the moment. Creating anything vaguely useful means working with a bunch of semi-related standards such as HTML, CSS, AJAX that between them just about manage to do what you want them to today. It’s a mess and we need a better solution.
• As Miguel commented on his blog, Microsoft have now consolidated their next-generation framework (now dubbed Silverlight) and I have no doubt that they will try hard to woo developers with this latest weapon in theirproprietary arsenal as they look to take over more and more of the web. Mozilla may finally be helping to claw back some of the browser share from M$, but if open standards can’t win the battle to define the technologies that are used to build the next generation of applications then we’re all in trouble. Unless you run Windows, of course.
• Having Adobe choose an open source license to release their code under provides further validation that this is a model that works for businesses. As if we needed that, though

Even more encouraging is Adobe’s promise that as well as releasing the source code under the MPL, they will allow others to contribute to this code. That’s when you start to get the full benefit of being an open source outfit, and Adobe have obviously twigged that.

There’s no mention of their Flash player in the release, the lack of a full open source implementation of the player obviously being a significant barrier to the take-up of Flash on Linux in particular, which will limit it’s usefulness on these platforms. Releasing this code under a similar license would no doubt win Adobe a lot more kudos in the open source community, but the Flex announcement will still be warmly welcomed by many. Maybe not by Mr Gates, though.

Could this be the beginning of the end for DRM? Steve Jobs surprises everyone by revealing that he wants rid of it. Or as ZDNet put it:

“You’ve got to hand it to Steve Jobs; he knows how to attract attention and how to deflect attention,� said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “He turned the whole European DRM question on its ear. ‘You want me to open up FairPlay? Well, I don’t even want FairPlay’.�

I think he needs educating on why MP3 and AAC are not open formats (even if you do put the word “open� in quotes) and his calling on all European citizens to protest to their local big evil record company does come across as a rather thinly veiled attempt to deflect the criticism that certain countries have directed towards Apple on the issue. But overall really encouraging.

The RIAA’s response to Jobs’ post was… Interesting. So interesting in fact that you have to wonder if they even read it through.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, issued a statement interpreting Jobs’ letter as an offer to license the FairPlay technology. “Apple’s offer to license FairPlay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels. There have been many services seeking a licence to the Apple DRM. This would enable the interoperability that we have been urging for a very long time,� it said in an emailed statement.

Apple clearly have a lot still to do to actually convince the record companies that this is the right way forward, but clearly it’s a step in the right direction.

Google’s Chris di Bona on why they use open source throughout the company, and not just in their development stack:

It’s all about flexibility for us. The terrific thing about open-source software is that we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission before we make changes to our operating systems. We don’t have to ask anyone’s permission before we make changes to our databases. We don’t have to pay any per-client licence fees for these things. This is really important, not just from a cost savings point of view, but from a flexibility and speed point of view.

So the lesson? Open Source may be cheaper than proprietary alternatives, but having the freedom to do what you want when you want with your software is more important than saving a few bucks.

Brought to my attention by a reference in a ZDNet article I was reading this weekend was an event Oxford’s Saïd Business School hosted on Monday, curiously titled event called Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford. Chaired by the FT’s Enterprise Editor Jonathan Guthrie, the event gathered together a varied group of Valley experts to look at how innovation and entrepreneurship can be better fostered in the tech sector.

The article linked to a webcast of the evening panel session which featured a number of luminaries including Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Matt Cohler from Facebook, Chris Sacca from Google and Allen Morgan from Mayfield. This is well worth a look for anyone interested in building Internet technologies, businesses or both.

Some interesting business-y points that came up:

• As Matt Cohler pointed out, HE institutions need to find a compromise between pure theoretical research favoured at for instance Yale and Oxford and the more applied approach taken by Stanford (and drawing similarities myself, Warwick) in order to give people the right skills they’ll need as entrepreneurs.
• Anecdotal evidence presented by the panel suggested that this year’s students have a lot more confidence and entrepreneurial energy than in previous years, but turning their ideas into a reality may be challenging. Most of the time it comes down to having the right contacts, which in turn relies on having the kind of culture that encourages that.
• VC isn’t dead, but there’s a lot of “scar tissue” around, according to Morgan. People are still investing in start-ups, but they need to have a solid model behind them. Encouraging stuff, given that Alfresco is one of the companies that Mayfield have funded in the last year.
• Guthrie came up with some interesting comparisons between the technology sector over the last ten years and investment in the railways and canal infrastructure in Britain in the 17-1800’s. Unlike the canals, the railways at least lasted longer than fifty years, but in both people lost a lot of money that they’d poured into flawed and ill-conceived projects in both. Sound familiar?
• The failure of a business can be a positive thing in some cases, if you can spot when it’s going wrong before it’s too late.

And on technology:

• Everyone talked of how social networks are increasingly important on the web and will become even more significant over the next few years. Most communities are based on users gaining some form of notoriety or reputation for themselves, such as on LinkedIn and MySpace. The best way to build a community is by giving it’s members something in return , i.e. there must be some form of self-interest.
• Matt Cohler talked about how monetising a community online requires you to focus on a particular demographic, but while still making that target group as big as possible. Maximising value requires that you find the right balance between the generality and specificity of a service.
• Chris Sacca looked at how users can be divided by either their generation or their age group and the distinction between the two. Services can be designed across these divides, and Google Talk was given as an example.
• There was agreement that we’re still in the early days of the web and we need to develop more advanced systems of authentication and accountability in order to build trust between people. Morgan summed this up well when he said that “Anonymity doesn’t always bring out the best in people”.
• As ZDNet discussed in their analysis, Sacca referred to the “gated communities” that currently exist on today’s wireless and mobile networks, comparing this with the net neutrality issue in the US. There was general speculation (mostly gloomy) on what will happen to the providers once IP finally becomes ubiquitous on mobile devices, with lots of analogies contributed about dams coming down and various techies in Silicon Valley trying to work out how to take them down faster.

Update: There’s also a webcast of the lunchtime panel sessoin available here.