Archive for the ‘maven’ Category

Maven Alfresco SDK 1.0 is finally out and ready for you to enjoy!

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NOTE: For those of you wondering about naming and version: yes, the Maven Alfresco SDK 1.0 superseded the old version of the Maven Alfresco Archetypes / Lifecycle 3.9.1.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!

226 days ago PERMALINK 1 likes 0 Comments

Maven and Scalability @ DevCon

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 ;)

243 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

Introducing the Alfresco Artifacts Repository – yes, with Alfresco Enterprise :)

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 »

379 days ago PERMALINK 3 like 1 Comment

What’s going on with Maven and Alfresco ? (WIP)

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.

413 days ago PERMALINK 1 likes 4 Comments

Maven Alfresco Lifecycle 3.9.1 Released

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!

438 days ago PERMALINK 1 likes 1 Comment

Alfresco DevCon Presentations

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 :)

544 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

Boost your Maven build with best practices

Today I’m approaching the Spring Surf RC2 release and one of the major thing that has been bothering me (and definitely the other devs) has been the slowness and instability of the Maven build.

Recurring issues like:

  • Huge overhead in repository snapshot artifact lookups
  • Multimodule useless plugin invocations
  • Build randomly failing on the build server
  • Release unnecessary complex

In this sense, as Maven has always been my boy, today I decided, prior to the RC2 release, to try and improve performances and stability of the build to a good extent before proceeding with release: in this sense, as I often suggest, a Maven project is somehow like a very sweet but complicated woman, who really need some Tender, Love & Care before actually being able to release all its potential.

And as I believe that, in the infinite hate & love between software writers and software users/configurators, Maven design has too many times blamed for circumstances that actually are fully under the control of the configurator (e.g. the dev who writes the Maven POM), while I go trough this Maven refactoring I dediced to share my experience and achievements with you, to actually try and somehow give Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar.

Read the rest of this entry »

972 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 1 Comment

[HOWTO] Build your JAR Alfresco Share Dashlet with Maven in 3 minutes

Two months without a post, and I come back again with Maven and Alfresco? Well, no news as the Maven Alfresco Community keeps growing..

So following the exciting news on Spring Surf and Share announced by Kev on trunk, for which since Alfresco 3.3 (now in trunk) we can now build Alfresco Share Extensions as plain old JARs, I decided to complete the Maven Alfresco Lifecycle with another archetype, providing a simple way and sample code allowing to build Maven2 Alfresco Share Extensions in minutes.

I’m sure this is going to interest the Alfresco community, same as it’s Ant counterpart build script which Will’s recently produced to accomplish the same task. The more, the merrier isn’t it? The big difference between that approach and the one we’re presenting is only that Maven enforce a standard project layout so it was fairly easy to put stuff to be packaged in the proper place.

This also comes as a very natural complement to the Maven Alfresco Share Extension Archetype (managing WAR customized builds for Share) for now it’s possible to build a Share WAR and have it depend on Share JAR modules. Great kudos go to colleague and mate Will Abson and Alfresco Engineers for having produced and nurtured the Site Tags Dashlet which is included in this archetype and that you can install following the next steps in a couple of minutes.

Couple of pre-requisites for running this:

  • Alfresco Repository WAR 3.3 (TRUNK) already running on Tomcat. You can build this from trunk and run it in your tomcat instance, or find it deployed in the Maven Alfresco Community Repository
  • Tomcat Manager already installed and using credentials “admin” with no password (config in conf/tomcat-users.xml)
  •  (optionally) m2Eclipse eclipse plugin to import Maven project (not needed but cool :) )

Ready, set, go: Read the rest of this entry »

1212 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 2 Comments

An archetype for Alfresco Share in the new Maven Alfresco Lifecycle release

As promised, just a brief heads up on the quite few changes ongoing in the Maven Alfresco Lifecycle project which is now supported by the Alfresco Community Maven repository.  Also I managed to pull out a new version of the Cmis Maven toolkit against the new repository.

Proceeding with order, first of all, I released today a new version (1.1.0) of the maven-alfresco-lifecycle package with the main interesting news (full changes report):

The long Maven Alfresco marathon was then completed by the release of version 1.0-beta-2 of the CMIS 1.0cd04 Maven Toolkit, pointing to the new Maven repository. No actual functionality was modified and it keeps on working happily (by default against http://cmis.alfresco.com) using the latest snapshots from the Chemistry AtomPub TCK trunk. I updated the documentation on the Alfresco wiki as well.

I hope this really helps as it’s just *not that* funny to go over those growing many documentation files to change repos again, so any edit or error you guys can spot in the docs === a beer on me when you seem me :)

Though I first have to apologize to the end users of this build, promising this is the last time this project moves hosting.
Now everything is consolidated, content as artifacts, as in the pure ECM spirit. And with a promising Share archetype to work and customize it productively.

Eager to hear your feedback (curious about the Share archetype), and especially at my Tech Talk on Maven and Alfresco…

…don’t be shy :)

1294 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 1 Comment

Dreams come true … launching the Alfresco Community Maven Repository :)

Busy days busy days, busy but definitely happy days ;)

after working a lot on the CMIS 1.0 Webinar (recording out soon) and having made my first official commit for Apache, I saw an unexpected but never so welcome outstanding speedup of one of the processes that I’ve been pushing in the Alfresco Community for about 3 years now.

I’m proudly announcing the institution of an Alfresco hosted Maven Repository, capable of consolidating and bring the Maven Alfresco Community to the next level. Hosting a repository (for Community artifacts only for now) means a great step towards a even more mature open source community which works against high standards of quality and automation.

I’ll be discussing and demoing this and other Maven Alfresco related topics in next Friday’s Alfresco Tech Talk Live. You’ll find more info on the Alfresco wiki.

For now, here’s a screenshot of our new shiny Sonatype Nexus 1.4.0 instance, which will allow a proper consolidation still scale-out for our community by the means of repositories proxying and Alfresco Community artifacts hosting. Kudos to everyone that made this happen :)

Alfresco Maven Repository

This is is a big step for the community which is growing around projects like the Maven Alfresco Lifecycle  and the small CMIS 1.0 Maven toolkit which I built for my recent training engagements.

In addition to that,  the mighty great news about the Alfresco SURF and Alfresco Webscripts project now being contributed to the Spring Framework under the newly born Spring Surf Extension (follow our work here), all of which is powered by Maven gives even a more central role to this technology in the company I work for.  Great job guys and thanks for giving me the opportunity to participate in this!

This is such a nice moment for me which I pushed for this since a long time, when I was still working for Sourcesense. And a special thanks must go to them for having first allowed me to work on a Maven Alfresco suite in the past and for having supported it with their Nexus instance, until we introduced an Alfresco Maven repo. Most content is now migrated so you can safely use the new repo in your POMs.

I’m still in the process of migrating (tomorrow should be done) all the apps to the new repo, so expect changes in the docs. I’ll keep you posted with the coming changes and news.

Also, please provide your feedback on this event so we can offer the best service around this important open source Application Lifecycle Management technology.

1295 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 3 Comments