Archive for the ‘opensource’ 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!

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!

This is probably more of a note to myself than anything else, since every time I have to do some sneaky X11 forwarding (e.g. to profile or perfomance tune a production server) it somehow never works the first time…having to waste at least 15, fundamentally boring, minutes to figure it out again.

Of course prerequisite is that you need to have some kind of X11 server running on your client, whose display will be forwarded to the server. Linux has it by default, Mac users can install it from the OS disks, for Windows users I suggest XMing to avoid the whole CygWin download).

So this is Gab self reminding recipe for that (tested from MacOS 10.6.8 to RHEL5):

  1. Make sure that
    "X11Forwarding Yes"

    is in your

    /etc/ssh/sshd_config

    on the SERVER SIDE

  2. Make sure that
    "ForwardX11 yes"

    is your

    /etc/ssh_config

    (or

    /etc/ssh/ssh_config

    for Linux distros) on the CLIENT SIDE

  3. Login to the machine with
    ssh -X user@host
  4. If “echo $DISPLAY” does not display any meaningful value (e.g. host:display) then you typically miss libraries on the server side. From root or sudo your should issue at least (this worked for me on all RedHat based distros):
  • yum install xorg-x11-xauth
  • yum install libXtst
  • yum install libXi

At that point you might have to logout/login but the you should be able to run whatever X based application (e.g. JConsole, JProfiler, can you tell I use Java? :) ) directly from the server and see the UI pop up on your client.

Never forget anymore Gab…and thanks for reminding to write this down my friend :)

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 :)

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 »

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 :)

Abstract:

Funny little story about open source business models and trends: this story goes about the long time discussed and awaited Alfresco Confluence integration, and goes back of almost one year. Confluence is the Enterprise wiki solution from Atlassian, while Alfresco…well I guess it does not need introductions on this blog :)

Short preamble:

This project started  in June 2009 hosted in Google code as joint open source initiative by Alfresco and an Alfresco pan-european partner,  Sourcesense: originally hosted on Google Code under the name “Confluence Alfresco Plugin“.  The project was originally meant to provide access to Alfresco documents from Confluence macros, and was based on the Alfresco proprietary webscripts ReST API. After a promising initial implementation was drafted, the project has not seen any commits as of Jun 2009: the reason behind this sudden stop was  that this implementation was based on very specific Alfresco APIs, and the rise of an Open Standard like CMIS would have made such an approach an early obsolete product.

Where one seem to stop, another rises from its ashes: as natural continuation of the Confluence Alfresco project, in the very same mid 2009 in Google Code a new project is opened under the, more generic, name of Confluence CMIS Plugin. As the name suggests, the scope of this set of Confluence macros was, not just to integrate Alfresco, but to provide Confluence a more generic support for any CMIS compliant repository: this open source & open standard approach was based on the initial versions of Apache Chemistry Java client, still under heavy development at that time, but already attracted some buzz in the Confluence community.

Present times:

Almost one year has passed since then, and I keep on receiving requests (almost on a weekly basis) from Alfresco partners and customers interested in an Enterprise solution for Alfresco Confluence integration.

What happened with Confluence Alfresco (and its successor Confluence CMIS plugin)?

Looking a bit deeper at the project’s mailing lists you can find some hint of what’s going on:

Sounds a bit like the ant vs grasshopper battle, doesn’t it?  :)
My view:

First of all, I must say I really do hope the two efforts will soon be consolidated into one, both from an open source contributor and also Alfresco business perspective.  Still for now, we’ll have to stick and choose one.

Those who know me already might already be guessing this: at the moment, I quite like the approach of the Confluence CMIS plugin, and not only because you can actually check out the code from Google Code / get snapshot releases NOW and have macros in your Confluence to work against any CMIS repository.

Ah, and also not just because I’m a committer in the Apache project (Chemistry) developing OpenCMIS, which is now used by this plugin :)

The reason is instead that I really do prefer an open approach to ECM, especially about building integrations, and that comes out of the my very personal idea of software development.

IMHO, being software development a process, there’s more to it than just a good mix of high quality code and good sales/marketing skills: to build a successful (and scalable) solution, you need to have a sustainable and lean process backing up the development of your solution, a process where systems and people can interact on standards basis and clear information flows, like the ones a controlled open source process can offer.

Conclusions:

The Confluence Alfresco CMIS integration story, is just one example of how the very same solution can be approached in multiple ways: with no doubt, from my perspective, the CMIS based approach is bound to be superior in terms of longevity and maintainability (thus reliability of the business model).

Also, in order to achieve a much broader target, it might be beneficial to keep it in the open source arena: this way, it might get the resonance and the broader adoption that the Confluence community is waiting to actually start consolidating content in more advanced ECM platforms like Alfresco (or any other CMIS compliant server), based on top notch libraries like OpenCMIS (BTW, we’re working toward a first release out soon).

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not just a Stallmann style fundamentalist: it’s still perfectly possible to develop proprietary (and maybe enterprise specific) extensions which might use a different licensing and business model, and maybe Alfresco specific capabilities. I just believe that for core ECM functionalities and product integration, it’s just always better to stick to the standard (especially after all the work put into the CMIS process).

And that sounds especially reasonable,  if you think that both Alfresco (LGPL licensed) and Confluence (offering free hosting for Open Source projects) have important stakes in the Open Source community and potentially customer/prospects which value the extended benefits of an Open (source + standard) approach.

And if you not convinced yet, I have few more thoughts on what I mean by Open (source and standard) ECM