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.

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.

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.

One of my favorite new features of Alfresco 3.2 is the concept of subsystems. Alfresco defines a subsystem as:

A configurable module responsible for a sub-part of Alfresco functionality. Typically, a subsystem wraps an optional functional area such as IMAP binding, or one with several alternative implementations, such as authentication.

In essence it’s like having mini child servers, each with its own Spring application context which makes configurability a lot more intuitive.

My first encounter with Alfresco’s subsystems was due to an AWPr jira issue that someone raised saying that STAr doesn’t work with Alfresco 3.2 because they “changed” the way authentication components are chained. To be honest my first reaction was “Oh no! More re-factoring!”. But then when I looked into how the Authentication Subsystem works it was clear that this new direction is better and allows for easier extensibility.

Remember how painful it was to chaining multiple LDAPs? Now it’s as simple as adding the following to your global properties file:

authentication.chain=ldap1:ldap,ldap2:ldap

then you create the following file/folder structure:

$TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/
Authentication/ldap/ldap1/ldap-authentication.properties

and

$TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/
Authentication/ldap/ldap2/ldap-authentication.properties

So what about custom authentication components like STAr? Piece of cake. All that needs to be done is create the following file/folder structure:

$TOMCAT_HOME/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/
Authentication/star/star-authentication-context.xml

star-authentication-context.xml would basically contain the definition of the authentication component and authentication service with very minor differences from what it looked like in Alfresco 3.1. I documented the exact syntax on STAr’s wiki page.

The final step would be to modify alfresco-global.properties to add STAr to the authentication chain like so:

authentication.chain=alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm,star1:star

It seems though that Alfresco 3.2r2 has a bug where it doesn’t pick up authentication subsystem entries from the extension folder on the shared classpath. So I had to release a new version of STAr (1.2.0) where the -context.xml file is in the STAr AMP and ultimately ends up inside alfresco.war. When Alfresco fixes this bug then STAr 1.1.0 will be sufficient.

To learn more about Alfresco’s subsystems and how to configure authentication components visit the following links:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Subsystems
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Authentication_Subsystems

Alfresco is running a 20-city Lunch & Learn series to review the new Enterprise 3.2 release, along with implementation best practices and solution demos.

Rivet Logic will be hosting the Washington DC, Orlando, and Boston Lunch & Learns over the next couple of weeks.

Click here to learn more and to register. We hope to see you there!

Join us in Waltham MA (Greater Boston area) and learn best practices for approaching and implementing projects with Alfresco ECM suite

• Determining your business use case
• Architectural best practices
• Development best practices
• Operational best practices

Our presentation was co-authored by Russ Danner of Rivet Logic, Jeff Potts of Optaros and Peter Monks of Alfresco

Where?
Rivet Logic Developer Forge, Boston
1050 Winter St
Waltham , MA
617.834.2781

When: 6:30 PM

Pizza, coffee and soda will be provided.

RSVP here to attend

At Rivet Logic we do quite a bit of work with the JBoss Seam framework, specifically with our Content Management System integration we call Crafter rivet.

Seam can be used with the Spring bean factory framework, a popular “IoC” or Inversion of Control / Dependency injection framework. Spring enables developers to create instances of java objects known as beans and then to wire them to other java objects. Most people working in J2EE today are familiar with this so I won’t spend any time going in to further detail here. Seam also supports the ability to use java annotations to declare a class as a bean and to specify how it should be wired through what they call out-jection and injection. Check out the Seam website for more details on how the Seam bi-jection mechanics work.

One question that has come up for me many times on consulting engagements is: “which approach to use, Spring or Seam bi-jection?” My experience shows me that the answer is not one or the other. Both approaches have significant benefits and can be used together to create a stronger approach than either one can provide on its own.

Here are some very simple guidelines

When to use Spring beans:

Infrastructure components and services are great candidates for Spring beans

• Such services are generally singletons within the system. Spring has excellent support for managing and wiring these objects
• Such service classes are often packaged in separate more commonly used libraries. Hard coding a bean name and wiring within the class definition or strongly coupling to Seam is less desireable.
• You want a very simple way to override the implementation at deployment time. Consider a scenario where you want to override a DAO. By managing the bean in Spring it is extremely easy to override the bean definition to use an alternate class and configuration in a given environment simply by placing an additional xml file in the classpath

When to use Seam annotations:

Domain specific components are good candidates for bi-jection.

• They are often fine grained application specific components.
• Explicitly stating how the component will be wired in the the class file has little impact on its re-usability because its scope is limited to the application at hand.
• Such components really benefit from one of Seams strongest features in its bean framework: Conversation Scoping. This is the ability to define a life-cycle which is shorter than a session. By limiting the lifetime of a object to its true life-cycle it’s possible to free memory up for other needs within the system. On large, high troughput applications the benefits here cannot be overstated.

By using a combined approach you get the reusability and flexibility of Spring framework with the performance orientation of conversation scoping and ease of development associated with Seam annotations.

Yesterday about 100 people crowded the halls of the Kellogg Conference Center in Washington DC as another round of Alfresco community summits got underway.

Bill Robinson (Alfresco, VP Sales) reported that 1% of the total Alfresco community / ecosystem base has been attending these meetings. The customer to vendor mix seemed to be about 50 / 50. As a member of Rivet Logic I now help to tip the scales on the vendor side. As a customer of Alfresco in my past life in publishing I can tell you that these events are really important for customers. The opportunity to network with other customers is unparalleled. If you can’t make it out to Atlanta or LA for the upcoming events, mark your calendar for next year. You can’t afford to miss these.

John Newton, Alfresco co-founder and CTO gave the keynote address and laid out the strategic and technical vision for the upcoming versions of Alfresco. As usual he did not disappoint. Alfresco will continue to attempt to disrupt the current ECM market with evolving open source business model and technical strategy and innovation. Of particular note:

• Alfresco will license the Webscript engine and Surf framework under an ASF (Apache Software Foundation) license. The repository and other core technology will remain under the GPL. Alfresco will retain ownership and continue to maintain these libraries.
• Alfresco will continue with ongoing activities in partnership with SpringSource (now a division of VMware) to integrate the Webscript engine and Surf in to Spring MVC.
• Some components of the platform, which are intended specifically for enterprise deployments, will only be available in the Enterprise edition of Alfresco.
• CMIS, an emerging content management standard continues along its approval process within the OASIS standards body, albeit at a slower pace mostly due to red tape. CMIS is to content repositories as SQL is to the database. In the late 80’s and early 90’s the adoption of SQL standards helped the relational database market gain widespread traction. SQL enabled third party vendors and development platforms more easily and cost effectively develop value. John Newton, a veteran of the SQL revolution, strongly believes that CMIS will have a similar effect in the content management space. CMIS will be a core component of the Alfresco architecture and strategy.
• Alfresco will be evolving its architecture to better support an ability to run in a cloud environment. Alfresco’s architecture has always contained key elements of cloud-ready software including its stateless service tier. Future enhancements will include functionality like repository sharding.
• The DM and WCM repositories will be consolidated. The AVM technology under the WCM repository will be retired in favor of a DM / CMIS based store which supports a similar feature set including snapshots, sandboxes, and a simplified layering scheme. This activity will lead to a, much needed single object model and a single set of core services for library functions, permissions, auditing and so on.
• Alfresco will focus on CMIS and WCM for 4.x.
  • Alfresco WCM focus will deepen its developer focus going forward with Spring and Eclipse integration.
  • Alfresco Runtime servers, currently based on AVM stores will be replaced with scalable CMIS runtimes.
  • Alfresco Share will continue to take on administrative functionality and should completely replace the Alfresco Explorer client by 4.x

I was able to get to the Records Management best practices break out session, which I found very informative. Strong RM capabilities and DOD 5015.2 certification have been a long time coming. Alfresco RM is implemented within Alfresco Share as a “Site type.” Users may be invited in to the RM space to become record managers and consumers. During the presentation we learned about current trends in RM and were treated to a demonstration of the RM application and the process of moving content through its lifecycle as a record from declaration to deposition.

Our CEO, Mike Vertal, outlined a large-scale records management solution that Rivet Logic has been working on with SAIC based on Alfresco, Liferay, and SAIC’s Teratext email archiving platform.

I gave a talk entitled Alfresco Best Practices, which I co-authored with Jeff Potts of Optaros and Peter Monks of Alfresco. The three of us are very excited to have had an opportunity to consolidate all of the practices, pointers and gotchas we’ve learned over the years. The presentation is aimed a variety of levels from Alfresco noobs to Alfresco experts and attempts to cover the lifecycle of a project from conception to deployment and operational aspects. It’s a lot of material to cover in 90 minutes. We invited listeners to tweet about their favorite best practices, practices they thought they could implement immediately and any areas we might have missed. The most active, productive tweeter in each section was awarded a much-coveted Alfresco Community Member t-shirt. We’ll be giving this talk in Atlanta, LA and at a number of the international meet ups – so bring your notepad and twitter account! For those who can’t make it to the events please watch and contribute online at: #alfrescobestpractices. All the material – including more detailed source material will be made available on line after the meet ups. We invite you to enhance and embellish the material. Also for those of you who run local community groups… this presentation is a great score. Download it and present it at your next meeting!