Alfresco Developer Guide

Alfresco is an open source platform for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. ECM includes things like Document Management, Web Content Management, Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0, Digital Asset Management, Records Management, and Imaging. At its core is a repository for rich content like documents, web assets, XML, and multimedia. The repository is surrounded by a services layer (supporting both SOAP and REST) that makes getting content into and out of the repository a breeze, which is why so many next generation Internet solutions are built on Alfresco.

Implementing Alfresco usually involves extending the repository to accommodate your business-specific metadata and business logic. These extensions are done using some combination of Java, JavaScript, XML, and FreeMarker.
This book takes you through a set of exercises as if you were rolling out and customizing the platform for a fictional organization called SomeCo, which wants to roll out Alfresco enterprise-wide. Each department has a set of requirements that need addressed. We will show you how to extend Alfresco to meet these requirements. By the time you've worked through the entire book, you will be familiar with the entire platform. You'll be prepared to make your own customizations whether they are part of a Document Management solution, a web site that uses Alfresco for content storage, or an entire custom application built on Alfresco's REST API. This book will give you the knowledge and confidence you need to make Alfresco do what you need it to do

Alfresco Developer Guide walks you through the customizations made as part of an enterprise-wide rollout of Alfresco; from custom actions to RESTful web scripts and everything in between.
Jeff Potts, Optaros' ECM Practice Director, blogger, and Alfresco's Community Contributor of the Year, takes you step-by-step through advanced customization examples. Whether it is customizing Alfresco's web client or creating your own application that interact with Alfresco via RESTful web scripts, it is all covered here.

• Set up your development environment using Eclipse, Apache Ant, and MySQL
• Extend Alfresco's content model with business-specific metadata
• Write custom actions, metadata extractors, content transformers, and behaviors using Java and JavaScript
• Customize the Alfresco web client with new UI actions, JavaServer Faces components, custom JSPs, dialogs, and wizards
• Roll your own REST API to enable a front-end web site to interact with the repository via AJAX
• Automate business processes using the embedded JBoss jBPM engine, adding logic to business processes using Alfresco's JavaScript and Java API's, and expose the business process to non-Alfresco users via a REST API
• Create a web form to allow non-technical content owners to contribute content into the repository, transform the content using XSLT and FreeMarker, and expos the content via REST
• Learn how to write a Java service that is accessible from the JavaScript API
• Expose the WCM deployment actions external to the Alfresco web client using the AVM API and RESTful web scripts
• Secure the repository by defining custom roles, configuring Alfresco to authenticate against LDAP (including setting up your own OpenLDAP server), and integrating Alfresco with JA-SIG CAS, an open source Single Sign-On (SSO) solution

This book focuses on teaching by example. Every chapter provides a bit of an overview, and then dives right in to hands-on examples so you can see and play with the solution in your own environment. All code samples run on both the latest Enterprise and Labs release.

This book will be most useful to developers who are writing code to customize Alfresco for their organization or who are creating custom applications that sit on top of Alfresco.

This book is for Java developers, and you will get most from the book if you already work with Java but you need not have prior experience on Alfresco. Although Alfresco makes heavy use of open source frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, JavaServer Faces, and Lucene, no prior experience using these is assumed or necessary.