Book Image

Alfresco 3 Web Services

Book Image

Alfresco 3 Web Services

Overview of this book

Alfresco 3 is the leading open source enterprise content management system that offers powerful features for interacting with the content in its repository from outside the system. These include the support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) implementation, reusable web scripts, and a Web Services API. This is the first book to show you how to use Web Services in Alfresco. Packed with examples, you'll learn how to build applications using Alfresco remote APIs based on SOAP and REST. You'll see how to use different APIs and bindings such as WebServices, WebScripts, and CMIS. Alfresco 3 Web Services starts off by showing you the services exposed by the Alfresco Web Services API, and how the API fits into the Alfresco software architecture.You learn to develop your application firstly by setting up and testing your Java development environment using the Alfresco SDK in Eclipse IDE and secondly by associating the Alfresco source code and Javadocs in Eclipse.With the help of real world practical examples, you learn how to do things like create, sort, and call Web Scripts, and invoke remote calls to Alfresco repository. To get the most from the Web Services API, you need to know about the basics of the Content Manipulation Language (CML), and the book takes you through this.Examples such as the bookshop application show you how to sign in, change user sessions, get, remove and change public and private associated contents, manage a cart for your e-commerce application, and so on.Next, by implementing a Microsoft .NET application using the Alfresco Web Services API, you see how to perform operations against the repository from your .NET application.The book provides you with REST and SOAP concepts, their comparison, basics of the FreeMarker language, Atom Publishing Protocol, JavaScript controllers, and the Apache Chemistry project.By the end of this book, you will be able to put together your knowledge about CMIS and the Apache Chemistry toolkit to develop a complete working application that uses Alfresco, via CMIS, as a back-end storage. Last but not the least, this book also covers the WebServices security profiles— the best practices for Web Services to promote better interoperability.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Alfresco 3 Web Services
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introducing the SOAP Web Services API

Chapter 7. Templating with FreeMarker

In this chapter, we introduce the FreeMarker templating engine that is used by Alfresco Web Scripts to provide a mechanism for generating a response at the end of the execution of a Web Script.

You will learn the basics of the FreeMarker language and a number of features that will be useful when developing templates for Alfresco. These are as follows:

  • Variables and how to interpolate values in the output

  • Operators and built-ins that can be used to build more complex expressions from simple variables

  • Directives and their effect on the flow of execution of the template

  • How to define macros for reusing blocks of code

FreeMarker has many uses, in addition to its use in Alfresco, so covering all the uses is outside the scope of this chapter. The FreeMarker documentation, which is available online at http://freemarker.org, is very good and complete, and you should refer to it whenever you have doubts about the syntax and the semantics of the language.