This title may be a little obscure for some folk so check out this Alfresco link. So this raises the question of who named the product/company? There is a lot of the Queen’s English throughout Alfresco.
That aside, I recently attended the Developer Intensive course in Virginia offered by About Objects Inc. For those who have not done much with Alfresco, it is, as the title of the course indicates, its intense. There is a lot of ground to cover as there is a lot to Alfresco. From installation, configuration, web scripting, extending, customisation, etc. Its built upon the ‘Best of Breed’ open source components and you will find yourself saying “Yes, I know that componenet and I wish I had spent more time investigating it”. For example, the stack includes Hibernate, Spring, EHCache, HtmlParser, Rhino, YUI and the list just goes on and on and on.
For those you do not know what Alfresco is and are wondering what the heck I am going on about, Alfreso is the Open Source answer to Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Its built upon existing Open Source products and development languages and it comes in a great price point of ‘free’. You can, of course, opt for the subscription based Enterprise version which offers support at a far less price point that with the big ECM players out there.
So apart from the Open Source stack and the cost of ownership, what is so special about Alfresco. Well its the flexibility, extensibility and modern approach to content management that makes it so appealing. I started using ‘Aspects’ in EMC Document 6 and thought they were awesome. Unfortunately for Documentum ‘Aspects’ were added to the existing architecture. On the other hand, for Alfresco, ‘Aspects’ were part of the architecture and are at the heart of the whole system. For example, objects do not have a lock property. This is applied as an aspect when a document is checked out for editing. When it is checked in, the aspect is removed and no more lock property. Fantastic. Only use properties and persist them for as long as they are required. There is a lot more going on here so well worth reading up on it.
I could go on praising Alfresco but of course there are some downsides. They are bullding the product on an Open Source model but potentially need more tranparency between the Enterprise tree and the community tree. The community tree is also at the bleeding edge so you do get a good taster of what is coming down the line. Hopefully the more I get using Alfresco and developing with it the more I can blog on it.
