The 2010 Bossies (Best of Open Source Software) awards were announced last week, and among the winners is the open source search technology Apache Solr. This prestigious award recognizes the best open source software for businesses every year, identifying the “most promising and cost-effective products available to IT organizations”. Being recognized alongside other highly-acclaimed products like Alfresco, Drupal and WordPress only signifies Solr’s maturity as an enterprise-class platform.

As the amount of digital content continues to increase during the daily operations of an organization, it becomes evermore important to implement an effective enterprise search tool to sort through and find relevant content. Over the past few years, Apache Lucene and Solr has taken the enterprise search industry by storm as it continues to gain visibility for its highly-scalable and robust search platform. It’s now being downloaded thousands of times per day, with over 4,000 enterprise customers, which include AT&T, Macy’s, and Verizon.

“With its recognition as the best of open source for 2010, it’s no surprise to us that Solr has emerged as a disruptive catalyst to mission-critical data-driven applications across the marketplace,” said Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination. “The community’s virtuous cycle of adoption and innovation deserves tremendous credit for this achievement, and so we offer our congratulations for this well-deserved recognition. Thousands of companies are gaining competitive advantage from the use of this innovative software, and this award further confirms that diverse and widespread adoption of Solr open source enterprise search is well established.”

As a Lucid Imagination partner and a long time integrator of Lucene and Solr search technologies, Rivet Logic is excited for the Solr community for this accomplishment.

Alfresco recently launched the Alfresco Community Committer Program (ACCP), which is designed to promote and encourage open source contributions to the Alfresco platform through a structured process.

Software contributions accepted into ACCP will include any and all software extensions, language packs, plug-ins, and integrations, which enhance Alfresco’s core capabilities, meet a specified set of standards and attain voting approval by the ACCP Committee.

While there has always been developer contributions to the Alfresco platform, the ACCP now presents a better way to organize the contributions that will ultimately benefit all Alfresco Community and Enterprise users.

To show our continued commitment towards open source and Alfresco, Mike Vertal and Russ Danner from Rivet Logic are both on the ACCP founding committee. We’re excited to see this new program start and how the extensions contributed by the community can further enhance the Alfresco platform and benefit the overall community.

For more information on the ACCP, please visit: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Accp

The topic of Liferay and Alfresco integration continues to be popular among portal developers and what we’ve seen is that in the last year both products have matured in important ways to enable better integration. This evolution also opens the door for more possibilities. And as we all know, with more options there is more confusion. From my readings on the Liferay and Alfresco forums I observe that there are two main issues that puzzle people when they’re thinking about integrating Liferay and Alfresco:
What are the different possible ways for me to integrate the two products?
Which approach should I use?

To help answer these questions I thought it might be useful to list what the current options for integration are as well as a brief description of the architectural implications of each.

Note that the type of integration I’m referring to here is between Liferay Portal and Alfresco’s Document Management (DM) repository, and not the Web Content Management (WCM) repository.

Option #1: Using the Web script Container
With this approach you would basically deploy Alfresco’s Web script container into Liferay as a portlet application. Your Web scripts would be deployed along with the container and will be fully executed within the Liferay Portal context. What’s new here is that authentication between the Web scripts running in the container and the Alfresco repository will be taken care of automatically. This is nice since it alleviates the need to deploy the entire Alfresco WAR file into the portal as was the case with Alfresco versions prior to 3.2.

That said you should keep in mind that (for now) to accomplish this you would need to deploy the Alfresco Share WAR file in its entirety into the Liferay portal. It should be mentioned though that according to Luis Sala’s blog post about the subject this is expected to change with the reduction of the needed WAR file’s footprint. Also, the portlet still needs some work to make it configurable from the Liferay Portal UI using portlet preferences — but I gather that this will be implemented eventually as well.

Option #2: Alfresco Web script Portlet rivet
Another option is Rivet Logic’s Alfresco Web script Portlet rivet (AWPr). This portlet is pretty much an Alfresco Web script proxy. With the help of a custom Alfresco authentication component known as STAr (Secure Token Authentication rivet), an AWPr portlet instance will use a series of Java HTTP Client calls to RESTfully and securely retrieve the rendered contents of a single Web script, proxy the contents so that all URLs are valid portal URLs (e.g. action URLs, serve resource URLs for downloads, etc.), and render the updated content in the portlet’s render phase.

AWPr has a very small footprint and thus can safely be used heavily on one Liferay portal page; meaning that a single portal page can have multiple instances of AWPr each configured to proxy a different Web script without much performance impact on the Liferay instance. Keep in mind that it is a proxy so the content is being transferred from Alfresco to Liferay and then from Liferay to the client browser, which might have some cost implications if bandwidth is not cheap and the Web script generated markup is large.

Options #3: Custom Portlet Development
For those of us who need to build their own custom portlets and need to have access to the Alfresco DM repository APIs from within their portlet code in order to perform certain ECMS functionality, there are a number of options.

CMIS
Recently, Alfresco, IBM, Microsoft, Documentum and others announced the submission of a new content management standard proposal called “CMIS” or “Content Management Interoperability Service” and on May 1st, 2010, the OASIS standards body approved CMIS v1.0 as an official OASIS Specification.

Alfresco has released a full implementation of CMIS v1.0, which includes support for both RESTful AtomPub and Web Services bindings. This basically allows Liferay portlet developers to use either one of those interfaces to communicate directly with the Alfresco repository (and any other content management system that supports the CMIS specification). More details on Alfresco’s CMIS support may be found at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS

RAAr
Another recently available option is presented by Rivet Logic’s Remote Alfresco API rivet (also referred to as RAAr). This API is a Java API that uses REST calls to communicate with a remote Alfresco repository. The advantage of this approach is that it provides all the pros of Alfresco’s Web services API but does not carry the burden of the SOAP stack — thus making it an attractive option for Java portlet developers.

RAAr is open source and is currently maintained by Rivet Logic Corporation. It provides most (if not all) of the Alfresco Foundation Service methods and can basically be used to do anything that the Alfresco web client can do.

More information about RAAr can be found at: http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/RAAr

Custom API
Even though it doesn’t really make much sense to do this I’m including this option just to be thorough. The idea here is that if you want to develop against Alfresoc’s REST API but want to abstract it using your own API you can do so. The problem with this approach is that depending on the problem you’re trying to solve you’ll eventually end up writing a CMIS API if you want to be platform independent (mostly) or RAAr if you want to access Alfresco’s service layer APIs remotely. So unless you have a legitimate reason to go down this road it’s most probably going to be better for you in the long run to stick with CMIS or RAAr.

This pretty much covers the options available for integrating Liferay with Alfresco’s DM repository. To know which options suites you best, you should weigh the features and drawbacks of each until you find a good fit, and with enough projects, making the right choice will start to become more obvious.

Last week, Rivet Logic officially announced its newly formed partnership with Lucid Imagination, the commercial company dedicated to Apache Lucene/Solr open source technology. This is an exciting partnership for us since we’ve already been working with Lucene/Solr technologies for quite a while and have implemented it in various Alfresco and Liferay projects.

It’s exciting to see how much the Lucene/Solr community has grown over the years and the adoption of its technologies into major enterprises worldwide. Lucene/Solr is now being used to power major sites like whitehouse.gov, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Monster.

This partnership reflects our commitment to partner with leading vendors in the open source community to design and implement enterprise-grade open source solutions, provide responsive consulting support, and advance the use of open source software through innovation and community leadership.

Alfresco is kicking off another “Lunch and Learn” event series this summer, and Rivet Logic will be hosting the New York and Raleigh events. The Lunch and learn series will take place in 25 cities across the US, Canada and Peru starting July 13, and will be produced by Alfresco partners.

The Lunch & Learn seminar series is designed to educate and inform organizations evaluating ECM solutions and discuss how businesses are benefiting from an open source platform like Alfresco.

Topics of focus include:

• Cost saving benefits of Alfresco compared to proprietary systems like Documentum, Open Text and SharePoint
• Real-world case studies of how organizations using Alfresco are seeing results
• Alfresco product demos

This will be a terrific opportunity for attendees to talk to Alfresco experts and hear first hand about the cost-saving benefits of Alfresco.

For more information and to register, click here.

We recently released a new case study, Team Beachbody: A Large-Scale Social Community Platform Built on the Open Source Liferay Portal, which highlights how Rivet Logic utilized Liferay Portal to build a revenue-generating social network for Product Partners and the business benefits derived from the solution.

Product Partners, LLC, an exercise and nutrition market leader, launched the Team Beachbody program as a membership-based online support community that offers a wide array of fitness programs. In order to generate revenue growth, Product Partners decided to harness the existing community around its products and combine it with the power of social networking to turn the site into a revenue generating resource. By offering active community members a percentage of sales of Beachbody products that they refer to new members, it encourages increased community participation.

Liferay Portal was selected as the development platform for its flexibility and scalability to cater to evolving business requirements and future growth, as well as its low total cost of ownership. Rivet Logic was chosen as the system integrator to implement the solution, and in particular, the WOWY SuperGym application, a featured element of the overall Team Beachbody experience. The WOWY SuperGym application has resulted in stronger customer loyalty and recurring revenue opportunities through a set of social collaboration features that encourage use and membership retention.

Click here to download the full case study.

Rivet Logic recently released the newly updated Remote Alfresco API rivet (RAAr) to support the latest Alfresco releases. RAAr was first released to the Alfresco community back in October of 2008, and provides an abstraction layer for remote communication with Alfresco ECM.

RAAr provides a simple, Java-based local library that may be used by one or more content rich applications and allows these applications to interface to Alfresco (including multiple Alfresco repositories from the same application). RAAr’s lower layers handle communication to remote Alfresco instances over ReSTful calls to Alfresco that get mapped to calls to the Alfresco Foundation Services (AFS) API.

RAAr’s Java library is backed by an Alfresco Web Script-based Java services that marshal/unmarshal calls and direct them to AFS. RAAr takes care of marshaling/unmarshaling of parameters and handles connection management to multiple-Alfresco instances. Furthermore, RAAr provides more coarse-grained calls for better remoting to enhance performance.

This new version of RAAr will support the latest Alfresco 3.1.x and 3.2.x releases.

RAAr is a free and open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.0. For more information, please visit http://www.rivetlogic.com/Forge/Rivets/Remote_Alfresco_API_Rivet.

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), released its “State of the ECM Industry 2010″ report yesterday. This report, underwritten by Rivet Logic, surveyed over 750 members of the AIIM community and yields some interesting facts about ECM, and in particular, open source ECM.

The study revealed that open source ECM solutions are only used by 6% of organizations, along with 3% for WCM and 2% for portals. But the good news is that an additional 9% plan to adopt open source for ECM, WCM or portals within the next 2 years. Most respondents also have an open mind on open source usage, with 64% saying that they would consider it mainly due to its cost benefits.

The report also covers other ECM-related topics including ECM business drivers, SharePoint, and Enterprise 2.0.

To download a full copy of the report, click here.

2010 is off to an exiting start for Rivet Logic so far with lots of stuff going on. Here’s what’s been keeping us busy recently….

A couple weeks ago, we officially released the JSP and Spring MVC versions of Crafter rivet, the open source Web content delivery framework we originally launched back in September of 2009. As part of our continuing commitment towards the open source community, we decided to build and expand upon the existing feature set of Crafter, to accommodate both JSP and Spring MVC based Web applications.

Last week marked our official launch of our near-shore software development facility down in Costa Rica. Although the Costa Rica center has been in operation since last year, it has only recently expanded to make near-shore services readily available to our customers.

Today, we’ll be participating as a panelist on open source CMS for a local DC WCM Meetup group meeting. The meeting is open to all, so if you’re in the area, swing by!

KMWorld, the leading information provider serving the knowlege, document, and content management systems market, is featuring their “Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” list in its March 2010 issue. This year, Rivet Logic was selected again, for the second consecutive year, to be part of this prestigious list.

“The firms on this list are true solution providers that are dedicated to understanding what their customers need and delivering elegant technology for the requirements of the knowledge economy.”

We’re excited and honored that the industry is recognizing our efforts in driving successful open source software adoption. Over the past year, as we’ve continued to grow as an organization, we’ve also seen a positive response from organizations as the interest and awareness of open source software continues to increase in the arena of content management and collaboration.