topic Alfresco is not production ready in Alfresco Archive

Alfresco is not production ready

unknown-user — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:11:31 GMT

I have just spent a day evaluating Alfresco, but unfortunately have had a very bad experience with it. I'm sharing a subset of the issues I've had here, in case someone can shed some light on why nothing works out of the box for me, when other people claim it is a stable, robust enterprise ready pl

Re: Alfresco is not production ready

mrogers — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:13:51 GMT

Where to start…

First of all is to say that 3C was never considered to be "production ready".   It was a labs release to introduce a preview version of web studio and an update for the media wiki integration.   http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_3c_Release_Notes, 3D is better suited for production use since it contains the bug fixes for the 3.0 code line, but if you are looking for stability, support and documentation then you need to look at the enterprise versions rather than the labs versions.

Now to your individual points.   Unfortunatly Alfresco did indeed apprear to be suffering from some instability with Tomcat 6 and Java which accounts for the JAXB and shutdown issues, you will find both issues discussed on these forums.

Problem 2 is I think a known issue.   Needs to be documented or worked around.

Problem 3 is a known issue that was fixed in 3D.

Problem 4 is outside my knowledge, I'm sure someone else will comment.

Problem 5 some labs users do have web studio running, but web studio is still preview quality code and is still some time away from being ready for production use.

Re: Alfresco is not production ready

unknown-user — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:13:50 GMT

Thanks for your reply mrogers.

I found the main cause of my problems - the alfresco labs download wiki pages are in a big mess. I reached the download page http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_Download via the "Downloads" menu option on the left. This page says it is for "current releases" of labs, and has a link called "Download and install Alfresco Labs 3" to http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Labs_3 which contains the download link I used, which is version "3C". From what you tell me, this isn't the latest version, so these wiki pages are out of date.

I now see there is an alternative download page http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Labs only available via a link on the main www website, but not via the menus in the wiki site. This has a link to a different set of download files, which are referred to as the "final" release. Is this the "3D" version you are referring to? The release notes don't mention "3C", "3D" or any other version descriptor, other than that it is "final". The release notes also mention the JAXB issue, although the statement that the issue is not present in versions later than JDK 1.6.0_0 is incorrect, and it tells you to copy the jar into the wrong directory. At least this set of pages has a link to installation documentation and FAQs, which did not exist on the old download pages and are full of information that would have been very useful last time around.

So I'll try installing the "final" version tomorrow and see if I have a better day than I had today.

I would however like a bit of clarification about the labs vs enterprise versions. Is the labs stable release suitable for production use or not? The name says it's stable, but you say if I'm looking for stability I should look at the enterprise edition. The alfresco website also only recommends labs for non-critical environments, but also says it contains all of the functionality present in Enterprise Edition. Is the labs stable release the same as enterprise 3.0.1? Why do they have different version numbering systems? There is a lot of contradictory information about this on the website.

I don't want to waste my time evaluating software that isn't stable, so do I have to go straight to the enterprise edition even if at this stage I'm happy with support from the forums?

Does the enterprise edition not contain web studio at all? If not, what is the most user friendly WYSIWYG plug in or system that is available for end users to create and modify web content?

I very much appreciate your help so far.

Thanks
Martin

Re: Alfresco is not production ready

krithika123 — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:14:32 GMT

Problem 5 some labs users do have web studio running, but web studio is still preview quality code and is still some time away from being ready for production use.

Hi,
With regard to the above i followed the steps and tried opening the Web Studio mentioned in the http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Studio_Tutorial_-_Custom_Site#Getting_Started.But instead of displaying the login page it shows me a static page which says

Welcome to Alfresco Web Studio (both in Firefox and IE) and the page remains unchanged .

I am using Alfresco-Labs-3Stable-Linux-x86-Install for installation.

Can u please help and tell me if the steps i followed for the Web Studio setup was correct .