Book Image

Alfresco One 5.x Developer's Guide - Second Edition

By : Benjamin Chevallereau, Jeff Potts
Book Image

Alfresco One 5.x Developer's Guide - Second Edition

By: Benjamin Chevallereau, Jeff Potts

Overview of this book

Do you want to create more reliable and secure solutions for enterprise apps? Alfresco One 5.x is your gateway to developing the best industry-standard enterprise apps and this book will help you to become a pro with Alfresco One 5.x development. This book will help you create a complete fully featured app for your organization and while you create that perfect app, you will explore and implement the new and intriguing features of Alfresco. The book starts with an introduction to the Alfresco platform and you’ll see how to configure and customize it. You will learn how to work with the content in a content management system and how you can extend it to your own use case. Next, you will find out how to work with Alfresco Share, an all-purpose user interface for general document management, and customize it. Moving on, you write web scripts that create, read, and delete data in the back-end repository. Further on from that, you’ll work with a set of tools that Alfresco provides; to generate a basic AnglularJS application supporting use cases, to name a few authentication, document list, document view. Finally, you’ll learn how to develop your own Alfresco Mobile app and understand how Smart Folders and Search manager work. By the end of the book, you’ll know how to configure Alfresco to authenticate against LDAP, be able to set up Single Sign-On (SSO), and work with Alfresco’s security services.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Alfresco One 5.x Developer’s Guide - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Dusting off your toolbox


Looking across both the basic and advanced customizations provides some idea about the extensibility of the platform. A commonly asked question at this point in the architecture discussion is, Does Alfresco have an API? Actually, it has several. Let's look at what APIs are available and where they are used. This should also give you some idea as to the tools and skills you'll need to have in your toolbox as you embark on your own projects.

The following table shows the APIs available and where they are used:

Alfresco API

Where Used

Comments

Foundation API

Rule actions, behaviors, Java-based web scripts, web client customizations, Activiti, standalone applications that embed the Alfresco repository.

As the name suggests, this is the core Alfresco API.

Alfresco One API

Web and non-web applications that need remote access to the repository.

The Alfresco One API was introduced with Alfresco 4.x, and is also present in the public cloud version of Alfresco. It provides the main remote API, and is the recommended API for developing remote client applications.

CMIS API

Web and non-web applications that need remote access to the repository.

CMIS provides a standardized set of common services for working with content repositories. Alfresco provides an implementation of CMIS Web service and RESTful bindings.

FreeMarker API

Custom views, mail templates, web script view logic.

FreeMarker is an open source templating engine.

Web script framework

Web and non-web applications that need to use REST to interact with the repository.

More of a framework than an API, web scripts implement a MVC pattern that relies on the JavaScript, FreeMarker, and Foundation APIs.

As the list of APIs shows, knowing Java will be the key to just about any successful customization effort. FreeMarker and JavaScript are important, but are easily picked up using Alfresco's code and online resources as references.