Many of Alfresco's user interfaces are built with a development framework called Spring Surf. The Spring Surf framework was originally developed by Alfresco and later on donated to the Spring Source foundation (http://www.springsource.org/extensions/se-surf). It is based on the Spring MVC framework and provides a way of breaking an HTML page into reusable component parts. This is also the framework that underpins the Alfresco Share application (the main user interface for Alfresco). One of the subprojects of Spring Surf is Spring Surf Web Scripts.

A Web Script is built up in the same way as a REST-based request and response model; the predominant web service design model. It is accessed via HTTP at a specific URL and when invoked, it responds with, for example, JSON. The Web Script implementation that produces the JSON response can use CMIS to talk to a CMS server to fetch data that should go into the JSON.

A Web Script is built up of a descriptor that...