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 Conference.  Registration 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

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:

• On one hand, from the Confluence CMIS Plugin list, we can read it was recently upgraded to use Chemistry OpenCMIS, the Apache Java CMIS client library. Lots of activity ongoing on Google code and an initial APLv2 licensed release out there.  At the moment of this writing it’s  providing interesting CMIS macros for Confluence, capable to work against any CMIS repository.
• On the other hand, the Confluence Alfresco list has seen lots of marketing and mailing activitiy going over in the last period, announcing a soon to be released plugin based on Alfresco ReST API: while there’s a nice demo, no new code was checked in Google Code as of 2009 and maybe the project will be moved to the Atlassian Plugins library. Also, it’s unclear whether it would be released as open source or proprietary ATM.

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 …

The open standard concept is indeed a very general one, as it embraces top down standards (i.e. when a committee of some form is created and the standard follows a formal approval process) and, especially since the rise of Open Source, bottom up standards (or standard de facto, i.e. recognized as standard because of major adoption of a large community and well known benefits).
For example, in the case of Alfresco, I would consider support for JDBC, JSR-168, JSR-170 and more recently CMIS as falling into the former category, while technologies like Spring or architectural patterns like ReST as part of the latter. Another example I’m familiar with which might fall in the latter,  is Apache Maven, which allows to use a standardized process for development, release and documentation of your project, and is used by most J2EE open source projects.

In my opinion, both these classes of standards are equally important to a sustainable development process.  They have to be leveraged and balanced, to allow both a potentially very modular growth in features by standard/clear interfaces, while still ensuring wide adoption thanks to the usage well known technologies and enabling tools.

And in my experiences, it’s only in the Open Source ecosystem that open standards can flourish and get stronger, as key building blocks of the backbone of many open and proprietary applications (thus driving also dependent processes, like resource provisioning and maintenance). For this, I’ve always been advocating to leverage open standards (and possibly open source implementations) in ECM integrations/customizations, both for clear architectural advantages and to also provide sustainability to the whole application lifecycle (and thus to the business model at large $$$$).

So when, almost couple of years ago, Alfresco strongly shifted to CMIS, I basically was a “happy camper”, as Nancy would say

I’ve been pushing, waiting, trying, educating and contributing to the standard in order to help as much as I could to have this out and kicking in the shortest time-frame. Biggest achievements of this last 2 years have been, on the personal standpoint, my committership for the Apache Chemistry project (which now provides, amongst others, a complete Java CMIS client called OpenCMIS) and, on the career standpoint, the wonderful chance of joining an Open Source ECM Software company like Alfresco.

Even better: participating to an open source open standard implementation, while working for an open source product company…seems a wordgame,  but now after 2 years of great efforts, it’s now fair to say, at least for the J2EE world, that:

“CMIS is ready and easily usable”

At this is because of a few amazing things happened in the last months:

• OASIS 1.0 CMIS ratification
• OpeCMIS and Chemistry merged in fully functional open source Java client under Apache
• Alfresco 3.3 (Community and Enterprise) offering a CMIS 1.0 complete and supported repository server

As Dave correctly says,  from now on, I think we should more and more try to build on top of this standard approach (and the simplicity offered by OpenCMIS) to achieve simply reusable content oriented applications.

This new open ECM is a bit like moving on from the Tower Of Babel of one off integrations, to open (standard and possibly source) content development aided by CMIS,  playing somehow the Babelfish (see image for a detailed architecture)  that unlocks your content from the specific repository  details…bringing it to an abstract domain model, ready to be introduced in complex, distributed, scalable content processes. Too poetic?
In other words, this open ECM it’s not just merely about open standards and/or open source products adoption: it’s more like a new way of envisioning content applications based on both the benefits of open standards and of the open source development process, at technical and communication levels.
After all, same as when design patterns were introduced they drastically changed the way we talked and designed software, we should exploit the great momentum of CMIS to start “talking the same content language”.

This is true for product vendors (which are rapidly offering support for the standard), but also for System Integrators and community members which might end up (finally!!!) building once and use (sell) everywhere.

And so (possibly also because I’ve been attending a Rage Against the Machine concert lately, my last quote and public call for action cannot be any different than:

“Content Workers of the World, Unite (under CMIS) !”

I’m just trying all media I can

I’m stuck in Rome and needing to back to A’dam ASAP… so if anyone is going back north out of Italy by car or whatever transportation…plz plz let me know

I’m also tring to get this done using a nice road sharing site…

Carpooling on the route Roma, italia - Amsterdam, paesi bassi

thanks in advance for any help!

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: (more…)

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):

• Migration of support and documentation to http://maven.alfresco.com
• Introduction of an Alfresco Share 3.2 ready customization archetype for developing Share customizations
  • Run Share in Jetty Embedded on port 8181
  • Overlays your customization on Share 3.2r2
• Improvement of Wiki and Maven site documentation
• See specific modules release notes for additional details

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

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

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.

When tweeting about it, I go this interesting consideration by my friend and ex-colleague Mario :

“@mindthegabz Congratulations! 9 months for a commit is like a childbirth…“

While I tend to agree on the quite same importance of  having a kid and doing an Apache Commit :p ,
does this also imply I should start seriously thinking about a larger family?

Don’t see it mentioned anywhere in the New Committers guide, am I missing something ?

Finally all the modules that I’ve been working together with the community, including AMP & Alfresco Extension Maven archetypes and the AMP plugin, under one single build, control and with a proper release process, called (almost obviously) Maven Alfresco Lifecycle featuring:

• Alfresco 3.2r support
• Tested latest versions of the plugins and archetypes (1.9.0)
• Multi-module documentation website
• Tested against Maven 2.2.1
• Changes reports
• Release Announcement email
• Update to the new Sourcesense Nexus repository

It was time to wrap up all this work (merging m2Alfresco, maven4Alfresco and other Maven Alfresco related activities) in a more usable and sustainable platform for growing it.

As usual, many thanks go to Mao that provided 1st class infrastructure support (and much more on the new Nexus Sourcesense repository.

And this being a double advantage, not only for the community but for the growing number of enterprise customers interested in working with Maven on Alfresco.
I would like now to grow it with features already present in some development branches and exciting new improvements like:

• Alfresco Share archetype support (already in 3.x branches)
• SURF / Spring tool suite integration (as Uzi shown us so to be so cool with the new spring-surf)
• Update and improve the quality of the sample contexts to match the latest and greatest capabilities

As said, I see the interest of the community at large around the project is growing so in case you’re interested I suggest you to participate by joining the lists or opening issues.

So just give it a try…it’s two Maven commands away

Would love to hear your thoughts on how to improve the platform and grow it to the next (enterprise) level. Don’t forget to check out the 3.1.0-stripped branch, where a Maven Calm based version is hosted and there’s already a working Alfresco Share sample project.

Have fun!

I’ve been working quite a lot lately on producing some sample and training material for the coming Alfresco meetups (tomorrow I’ll be presenting the CMIS Master class  live from Madrid), and so I decided to mix and match the two things I can do best:

• Using my beloved Apache Maven
• Using the Chemistry AtomPub TCK (former Alfresco CMIS TCK) that we contributed to ASF to provide high level access to the CMIS ReST API

This effort, which I’ll probably heavily use in the next days Master Classes and training session, turned out to be quite productive as in a couple of days of work I was able to:

• develop a Labs framework which wraps Chemistry TCK embedded CMISClient
• provide an easy CMIS 0.62 application(s) scaffolding platform using a Maven multimodule project
• produce and release a Maven archetype which is now hosted our partner Sourcesense repositories ( big thanks go to this folks for being always supportive with their Maven maven infrastructure) and can be used as CMIS launchpad / labs / toolkit

Trying it is very easy, due to Maven archetypes power, and you can have the full Labs toolkit downloaded and installed on your by just selecting ‘cmis-master-labs-archetype‘ in the options of the command below:

EDIT

mvn archetype:generate 

-DarchetypeCatalog=http://maven.alfresco.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/archetype-catalog.xml

mvn archetype:generate 

-DarchetypeCatalog=http://repository.sourcesense.com/nexus/content/repositories/alfresco.public.releases/archetype-catalog.xml

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://repository.sourcesense.com/nexus/content/repositories/alfresco.public.snapshots -DarchetypeGroupId=org.alfresco.enablement.codecamps.cmis -DarchetypeArtifactId=cmis-master-labs-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=1.0

This will create a multiproject structure ready for use. You’ll just need to configure (in a single sourced fashion for the whole suite)  the CMIS endpoint properties in the main POM, by editing the following properties:

<!-- SINGLE POINT OF CONFIGURATION FOR CMIS ENDPOINT -->
<properties>
<!-- Configure here the CMIS endopoint For the whole suite -->
<cmisserviceurl>http://192.168.154.128:8080/alfresco/service/api/cmis</cmisserviceurl>
<cmisusername>admin</cmisusername>
<cmispassword>admin</cmispassword>
<cmistracerequests>true</cmistracerequests>
<cmisvalidateatom>true</cmisvalidateatom>
</properties>

All the nice tracing and validation features of the Chemistry TCK are exposed, once that you configured the POM to point to a proper CMIS 0.62 compliant server (e.g. Alfresco, and an Ubuntu Alfresco VM is available here for this purpose). Specifically the toolkit offers 3 Maven submodules

• cmis-support –> Support JAR which wraps Chemistry TCK CMISClient
• cmis-query-webapp –> Very basic SpringMVC webapp querying a CMIS repository and showing results/entries
• cmis-lab-atompub-binding –> Learning lab on how to import data in Alfresco (complete class in the solution folders)

and a lab-solutions folder.

Using it is pretty straighforward. A simple

mvn install

will test the support against the provided configuration, while entering the cmis-query-webapp folder and running

mvn jetty:run-exploded

will result in the (quite ugly) but functional CMIS Query interface you can see below:

using a simple three tiered architecture like the one that follows:

Lastly entering the lab-atompub-binding folder and running

mvn test

will run the sample JUnit empty test for the data import lab. Solution (real Test class) is to be found in the labs-solutions  folder.

It’s a beginning but I believe it’s a very nice tool to overcome the somehow still steep learning curve around CMIS, so I warmly suggest you start installing the VM and the archetype and play around with it, and even use it as start for your integration/contribution projects. Especially if you are going to attend Alfresco meetups this month. I’ll surely post the Labs slides later this month, so stay posted!

EDIT

The CMIS 1.0 Public Review compliant toolkit (working against Chemistry AtomPub TCK Trunk 1.0) is available on the Sourcesense repository and it’s added to the remote catalo mentioned in the previous command.

As a side note, at the moment this toolkit provide support for CMIS 0.62 while http://cmis.alfresco.com is Alfresco supporting CMIS 0.70: I’m planning to update the archetype (just a mere Maven dependency ) to use the HEAD version of Chemistry TCK that is supporting 0.70.

Feedback welcome as usual!

Hope this really helps