Intro To Alfresco Part 3

A Developer’s Introduction to the Alfresco Platform Part One: Learning Your Way Around Part Two: The Content Model, Rules & Actions Part Three: Web Scripts, Surf, & CMIS Jeff Potts Content Management Practice Lead

Recap

In Part Two we looked at some very basic building blocks within the Alfresco platform

Custom content model

Rules

Actions

In Part One we looked at a pattern for custom content- centric apps

What is the Web Script Framework?

Alfresco’s REST API can be thought of in three chunks

Alfresco URLs used by Explorer and Share (tagging, comments, blogs, discussions, etc.)

CMIS URLs used for generic node operations, queries, and repository traversal

Custom URLs

Web Script Framework used to declare a URL, bind it to logic, provide views

Model-View-Controller pattern

Controller implemented in JavaScript or Java

Views implemented in FreeMarker

Deployed to the repository or the classpath

What is CMIS?

Draft OASIS specification, not a ratified standard yet

Alfresco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, FileNet support

Alfresco rolled out an early implementation of the draft spec as well as a unit test suite

Two parts

Interoperability through standard SOAP and RESTful bindings

SQL-based query language for rich content repositories

RESTful responses returned as extended ATOM

Think of it as a language-independent, repository-independent API for content management

CRUD functions for nodes

Check-in/check-out

Associations

Policies

Queries

Repository traversal

What is Surf?

Web application development framework built on web scripts

Essentially web scripts++

Page definition

Declarative handshakes to HTTP end points

Page, page type, and object dispatching

Includes built-in hooks for talking to Alfresco and loading objects from the repository

Surf’s Two-Tier Architecture Connectors Model Objects Pages Templates Components Themes Associations JSON Web Scripts Repository CMIS Social UI JSON Content Graph Documents Folders Associations Aspects Presentation Tier Repository Tier Spring REST Web Scripts FreeMarker Dispatcher Surf

Demo