Uzi’s Blog

SpringOne was a really good event this year!  Alfresco attended and we had the chance to catch up on all of the latest from the Spring community.  We also had a chance to demonstrate some of the work that we’ve doing with Surf and with Web Scripts over the past few months.

One of the main efforts we’ve achieved is to package Web Scripts and Surf up really nicely so that they can injected as views into a Spring MVC application.  This has meant isolating everything down into Spring MVC view resolvers and incorporating a Maven2 build architecture.

There are many benefits to this -

• The increased use Spring IoC and Spring MVC patterns means that both Web Scripts and Surf are easier to extend through configuration.  Really nice for developers!
• The Maven2 build structure lets developers pull Web Scripts and/or Surf into their own web applications as they see fit.  In other words, scriptable remote APIs and scriptable page design is now something you can plug in as you see fit.
• It all works really nicely within SpringSource’s existing tools and development facilities.

We also invested into developer tools to make things even easier for folks to utilize Surf and Web Scripts for their web applications.  These include:

• Surf command-line scaffolding for Spring Roo.  Spring Roo was really a big hit at Spring One.  Ben Alex and the Spring team really did a great job on it!
• Eclipse plugins for SpringSource Tool Suite

Thus, there’s been a lot of investment into Web Scripts and Surf.  And, of course, this is only speaking to the technical platform.  If you take a look at what’s happening in the CMIS world, you’ll see that much of this platform work is because Web Scripts itself acts as a foundation for CMIS and dynamic REST interfaces.

The two main drivers for these improvements is that they a) help Alfresco to deliver better applications in less time and b) help the Alfresco community to build better applications in less time.

In the coming month, you can expect to hear a lot of really positive news on this front as we integrate this work forward on the road to Alfresco 4.0 and our CMIS platform.

But for now, to get a sense of what this is all about, I’d encourage you to check out this video that I put together on how these tools all fit together.  If it feels a bit unpolished, well spotted - I tried to make this thing on my first Mac and my skills are clearly feeble!

Stay tuned for more!

Michael