Archive for the ‘alfresco’ Category

Il mio primo post in Italiano? Ebbene si’, l’occasione era cosi’ importante che ho deciso di aggiungere, almeno per lo spazio di un post, una terza lingua a questo blog :)

Da domani, all’Universita’ di Roma Tre, comincia una conferenza che sta rapidamente diventando una delle piu’ importanti in Europa, per quanto riguarda il mondo open source e dell’innovazione tecnologica: sto parlando di Codemotion, la conferenza (internazionale ma da una idea totalmente italiana) dedicata a tutti i linguaggi e piattaforme del mondo open source, che quest’anno comincia la sua stagione a Roma, ma che si spostera’ a Maggio a Berlino e ad Ottobre a Madrid.

Oltre a i tanti sponsor e track interessanti, da Arduino a Domain Driven Design, da metologie agili a buzzword piu’ recenti come mobile e big data, quest’anno sono felice ed orgoglioso di annunciare che Alfresco sara’ sponsor della conferenza e sara’ presente in maniera massiccia per legare con la comunita’ italiana e per condividere il messaggio innovativo della piattaforma leader nello spazio dell’ECM ibrido.

Vi segnalo i diversi modi in cui potete mettervi in contatto con noi durante la conferenza:

  • Passate a visitarci al nostro stand se volete sapere quanto sia cool la nostra tecnologia, ma anche rockstars della nostra community come Jeff Potts (Chief Community Office) o il nostro consulente tecnico Maurizio Pillitu … ah si, e ci saro’ anch’io :)
  • Venite ad uno dei due talk che presenteremo nei track della conferenza:
  • Domani pomeriggio, accorrete numerosi all’Alfresco Rome Meetup che si terra’ sempre a Roma 3 e nel quale uniremo topics strettamente tecnici (come CMIS e Maven SDK) a presentazioni dei nostri partner e clienti. La maniera perfetta per capire come Alfresco possa migliorare i vostri processi e flussi di informazioni. Il programma dettagliato e’ pubblicato sul blog di Jeff.

E come se non fosse abbastanza eccitante, il tutto si svolge nell’Universita’ che mi ha cresciuto e fatto diventare l’ingegnere (un po’ strano per carita’) che sono adesso. E’ sempre una sensazione strana, ma bellissima, trovarsi dall’altro lato della cattedra …

Un tuffo nel passato per dare uno sguardo al futuro…vi aspetto numerosi!

EDIT:

Le slide del talk sono pubblicate sul mio slideshare. Spero che il talk vi sia piaciuto!

It’s been a long journey, but we made it ;)

It started almost 5 years ago, and through the years, little by little, we made giant steps towards an open development platform.

If you have followed this blog earlier, you probably have shared some of the pain for an unnecessary difficult integration process of Alfresco artifacts, therefore today we should all re-joy as development on Alfresco got just so much better ;)

Thanks to the great work of the whole Maven Alfresco Community and the strong momentum and Support from Alfresco Engineering and Release Management, it’s with extreme pleasure and pride that I announce you that a fully fledged Maven Alfresco SDK™ 1,0 is now available for your enjoyment and to drastically improve your development productivity on Alfresco projects.

While I recommend to you have a look at the full docs and to the release notes to understand the full extent of features of this brand new piece of software, let me just give you here an overview of the  most exciting features:

  • Zero configuration approach: create an AMP or All-in-One archetype and with one command you are ready to run and customize Alfresco. In the very same place :)
  • Zero download approach: the SDK will take care of downloading the appropriate Alfresco artifacts from the Alfresco Artifacts Repository. Also no DB or application server is required, as the SDK will runAlfresco emdedded on Jetty + H2.
    Note:
    this configuration is not part of the supported stacks, so should be used only for development purposes
  • Zero BS development approach: with new SDK the focus is your creativity, no more boring configuration or hacks to make a particular work.  Just get the setup right with an archetype and start to kicking it on Alfresco :)
  • Zero defect is the main objective of the SDK: with support for AMP unit and integration testing, as well as integration with the strong enterprise development process feature of Maven (e.g. CI, release mgmt, etc.), you can get you Alfresco development to another level. This was made thanks to the availability of POM files for Alfresco Artifacts (as of Alfresco 4.2.b).

NOTE: For those of you wondering about naming and version: yes, the Maven Alfresco SDK 1.0 superseded the old version of the Maven Alfresco Archetypes / Lifecycle 3.9.1.  As of Alfresco Community 4.2.b the Maven Alresco SDK 1.o is the recommended solution.

But without further ado, I can’t wait to join the other Alfresco Rockstarts at the DevCon hackaton, I’m sure we can boost some productivity down then with this SDK. Once again, check out the project website for full docs.

I want to thank you everyone involved in making this happen (especially Mao and Samuel) as we believe it will be a major improvement for the developers, architects and administrators of Alfresco project, finally providing a solid foundation to doGreatWork() and this great product.

Enjoy and let us know your feedback!

Sounds like it’s happening. More, much more that I could expect. Much better than before.

At Alfresco in fact we are finally about to close on two fundamental areas like ECM Scalability and on the availability of a fully fledged Maven based SDK.

As you might know (if you are reading this blog you probably will), these on the two areas I’ve always been passionate and involved for in the last few years. Just to let you understand how passionate (or romantic, almost Italian) about these topics, enough for you to know that:

    • I ranted about Maven for a few years now and, in this last year, I experienced a momentum never seen before both from a corporate and from a community standpoint. Literally, about to cry here :)
    • I worked for many years as Alfresco Partner and Solution Engineer, without having a quantitative sizing and performance reference for my implementations. In the last year I participated to the Alfresco Benchmarks project, which has shown very interesting results and improved the scalability of our system exponentially. I am so excited about these improvements, both at process and product level, that I can’t wait to share those with you :)

So it’s just a great pleasure and excitement for me to confirm we have a couple of so much awaited HUGE surprises on those areas ;)

But without further ado then, it’s my pride to officially announce that …


…no wait, I have a better idea.

If you are really interested and you want to know what’s going on around Performance and SDK, it’s quite simple: you should just come by for one of the two great DevCons (Berlin and San Jose) that are approaching in November :)

I will give two speeches at both EMEA and Americas DevCon, surprisingly enough about:

And if you are not convinced, hear is a little teaser ;)

Native American Artifacts

Native American Artifacts

It’s my honor – and a a huge personal satisfaction after a few years working on this – to announce the full availability and support of the Alfresco Artifacts Repository, a fully fledged Maven repository hosting the major Alfresco releases and of its flourishing projects ecosystem, both for the Alfresco Community and Enterprise Networks.

For those of you already following this blog this might be no big news, as somehow the information was already around in the Alfresco-sphere and an Alfresco Maven repository has been already unofficially (AKA maintained by me) around for a while. But the great news is that now the repository is officially maintained and artifacts are kept up to date :)

Based on the Nexus OSS mature Artifact Repository technology, and following a few weeks Partner only beta, the repository is now publicly available at:

http://artifacts.alfresco.com (formerly http://maven.alfresco.com)
The Alfresco Artifact Repository

The Alfresco Artifact Repository

What can you find in there (AKA the screenshot is not enough)? Very well, at the moment the Artifact Repository hosts:

  1. Alfresco Community full releases (JARs/WARs) identified with the groupId org.alfresco
  2. NEW: Alfresco Enterprise full releases identified with the groupId org.alfresco.enterprise
  3. NEW: Alfresco Hotfix full releases identified with the groupId org.alfresco.enterprise
  4. Activiti (BPMN 2.0 implementation) Releases and Snapshots
  5. All the versions of the open source Maven Alfresco Lifecycle, a long term but quickly growing Maven SDK approach to Alfresco development
  6. All Spring repository proxies, to ease Spring Surf development by only referring to this repository developing Surf

NOTE: At the moment no POM files / dependency declarations are available, but if you are interested please feel free to vote on this issue :)

Still not sure about the potential? Well, let me just give you an idea:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just in case you were wondering, this is the time things are actually happening.

If you are working or willing to work on Alfresco ECM platform with Maven, you better stay tuned and keep your patience for a few weeks more.

Why?

Well for a few interesting reasons:

*  The Maven Alfresco Community is growing and every day there is more activity in the lists and on the code contributions side. If you need information around Maven and Alfresco, the Maven Alfresco discussion group is the place to be.

* Alfresco is integrating Maven artifacts deployment in its build process (see issue): we are literally days away from having 3.4 and 4.0 Community and Enterprise versions available on the Alfresco Artifacts Repository. BTW, bear with us in these days as some changes might be undergoing in the repositories. This is great news for all of you who are hosting corporate repositories (especially for Alfresco Enterprise) as this way you will just have to point to maven.alfresco.com to retrieve Alfresco artifacts

* We are working actively (kudos to Mau) on a clean, neat, supportable version of the Maven Alfresco Lifecycle project: if you check out the experimental branch you’ll find a nicely merged, lean, fully functional set of parent POMs and archetypes to allow you, for example, to run a full Alfresco Repository, Share, AMP, etc. as a single project embedded in Jetty and H2. Nice, ain’t it? Stay tuned there because we are aligning that to the automated deployment at point #2, so we’re just really weeks away from a nice, fully featured, extensible but above all standard open Maven Alfresco SDK.

As we do lots of progress on this area, your feedback is more than welcome and, once again, bear with us while we actively work to make your Maven Alfresco developer life easier.

Hey guys,

I’m proud to announce that thanks to a vigorous Community help (special mentions and kudos to Mao and Stijnr for the great help in the last period), we have been able to pull out the 3.9.1 release of the Maven Alfresco LIfecycle.

Multiple bug-fixes, a zero defect targeted release and a couple of juicy new features like:

make of this one probably the most stable and tested release of the Maven Alfresco Lifecycle. The release is tested against Alfresco 4.0b Community, and it’s the perfect foundation to the great work we are going to do in the next weeks to clean it up completely and support Alfresco Enterprise.

The releases is available in the Maven Alfresco Repository (in case you are wondering, I still need to update the archetype-catalog.xml, but that will happen just after Easter, as I have no permissions right now :( ). Full release notes are also published on the Google Code project and per component documentation is available in the brand new published Maven Site (using the HUGELY COOL Maven Fluido Skin).

Feedback is always welcome in the Maven Alfresco List and we also have a Skype chat so feel free to contact me on Skype if you want to contribute / participate in any way :)

Have fun and let us know what you think!

A bit late, but for those of you following this blog who did not join either the San Diego or the London Alfresco DevCon, here are my 3 presos I gave in both conferences available in Share:

Turnout was great and the event was wonderfully mastered by our beloved Chief Community Officer: regarding my presos, I found a very good general interested public on my Maven + Alfresco Application Lifecycle preso, as the Slideshare searchbox top suggestions seem to confirm :)

Alfresco DevCon and Maven top search in Slideshare :) A couple of other presentations were using Maven and I even heard our mighty VP of Engineering mentioning the magic 7-six lettered word a couple of times in the Engineering QA panel.

New challenges in scalability and complex application management are to be expected with the so long awaited Alfresco 4.x version (BTW, don’t forget to join the 4.o EE launch parties :)

So I think we can expect more VERY juicy news VERY soon in scalability and Maven…once again, stay posted :)

I’m very excited about what’s going to happen and I’m going to participate to next week in my mother country :)

If you did not know (and so should definitely join!), next week we’re holding an Alfresco Developer Conference in a nice venue in Rome!

The DevCon is spread over two days (Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th of April) and will be full of technical in depth topics on Alfresco product and application development.

On day 1, we’ll be hosting a full day introduction of Alfresco Fundamentals, in which I’ll be giving quick and effective insights on Alfresco key concepts like Repository, Content Modeling, Architecture & Technologies.

On day 2, the agenda is full of Alfresco stars like our Product Managers Mike Farman & Ben Hagan, giving us a full insight on the new and great evolutions of Alfresco 3.4 (and above) in the Social Content Management era. I will also be giving a talk about latest CMIS (and the recent OpenCMIS 0.3.0 release) evolutions and how you can leverage them with Alfresco.

Most of the event will be held in the English language, but for all my talks I guess we can of course be a bit more flexible and go for Italian :)

So, if you did not do it already, please subscribe to this event and join the most interesting Alfresco technical event and first Alfresco Developer Conference in Italy!

See you there!

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And almost 18 months after Surf-ing in Munich’s snow, but this time as a presenter, and in the quite warmer venue of Cagliari, I was lucky enough to be invited by Max to speak at the Spring Framework meeting last weekend.I just published the slides about my talk “Spring Surf and OpenCMIS, the dynamic duo”, while, considering my agenda of the next weeks/months, I guess it’ll take a while for me to find a little rest and publish some nice photos of the wonderful Sardinian landscape I’ve visited.Nevertheless (as some German friend of mine like to repeat more than often), stay posted!

Short informative bulletin for Open Source (and especially, of course, Alfresco) Contributors, with two big news on the radar I thought you should be aware of.

ACCP  (Alfresco Community Committer Program)

Did you know that Alfresco is organizing an Apache style meritocracy based Community contribution program? Did you know that it’s completely community driven and you can participate by proposing your project for incubation?

A full initial committee is ready now to start incubating and progressively gather quality open source solutions hosted by Alfresco. If you’re interested in participating and contributing your project, visit the Alfresco ACCP dedicated wiki page and register for the ACCP introductory webinar we’re organizing on July 28th ( 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK)

Alfresco Developer Conference

A all-rounder technical introduction to Alfresco (from noobs to hard core Alfresco rock stars) 2 days conference will be hosted in Paris AND New York after summer, under the name of Alfresco Developer ConferenceRegistration is already open for Paris and we’re very excited to foresee 48 hours full immersion in the newest technical bits and new frontiers of ECM using Alfresco. While we’re still working on the details, the three main tracks we’re likely to cover are CMIS, WCM and Repository services. I’d be happy to gather and bring to the organization committee any feedback on topics you’d like to discuss or see covered during these session, so don’t be shy and shoot your comments :)