topic Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio? in Alfresco Archive

What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

heydenb — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:33:23 GMT

It is clear to me that the future interface is Share. There is still a lot of work to be done, but Alfresco keeps investing in this Share interface.Share is based on the Surf platform which is donated to SpringSource, so I guess it's Alfresco's intention to go further with this Surf platform.What I

Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

chrisb — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:22:05 GMT

I would also be interested to hear what the plans for Web Studio are going forwards, especially with regards to inclusion in the enterprise offering. Is Web Studio likely to become part of the enterprise distribution, and if so have any time scales been discussed / agreed?

Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

difranr — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:52:07 GMT

I would love to hear the answer to this as well.

Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

mrogers — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:22:59 GMT

<Disclaimer, I may be an alfresco engineer, but I'm not involved with Web Studio>

Have you noticed on Alfresco HEAD that the "Web Studio" project no longer exists?

Its not quite as dramatic as that sounds because it has simply moved over to Spring.

However that probably does mean a little loosening of control over WebStudio from Alfresco's part. And I suspect it means that Web Studio will not be part of Alfresco Enterprise.

That, I hope, will not stop web studio from being useful for the Enterprise and Community versions, but let's see how it works out. I would hope that it means that you can become more directly involved with WebStudio and I look forward to seeing how it works.

Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

ajmillar — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:29:51 GMT

Alfresco now seems to be championing the SpringSurf framework that utilises Roo for building surf based applications. The documentation that is included with it is a lot more detailed than anything that came with Surf (thankfully) and makes Surf a little more penetrable which has been its major failing up until now. SpringSurf integrates with Eclipse and provides a nice little IDE, although much of the functionality of Roo is still through the console. Alfresco just needs to provide a bit more documentation about how to utlise their built in web scripts and they are going to have quite a powerful platform that will take off big time when/if CMIS is eventually widely adopted.

Check out http://www.springsurf.org for more information.

Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

darryl_staflund — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:18:12 GMT

Alfresco now seems to be championing the SpringSurf framework that utilises Roo for building surf based applications. The documentation that is included with it is a lot more detailed than anything that came with Surf (thankfully) and makes Surf a little more penetrable which has been its major failing up until now. SpringSurf integrates with Eclipse and provides a nice little IDE, although much of the functionality of Roo is still through the console. Alfresco just needs to provide a bit more documentation about how to utlise their built in web scripts and they are going to have quite a powerful platform that will take off big time when/if CMIS is eventually widely adopted.

Check out http://www.springsurf.org for more information.

I am hoping, too, that the Spring Surf team will create a lot more documentation describing how to integrate Surf into SpringMVC, for Surf is now one component of the larger SpringMVC technology stack and learning how to use it properly given its place in this technology stack is important to using it effectively. Questions I'd like to see discussed would be the following:

When should we use Surf and when should we use Tiles (for example).

When should code be placed in webscripts and when should code be placed in SpringMVC Java controllers?

Pros / cons of using server-side Javascript and Groovy as your scripting language.

Apparent duplication in request mapping information when SpringMVC controllers are used with webscripts. In SpringMVC, request mapping information is handled using the @RequestMapping annotation, while in webscripts, this information is found in the descriptor files.

Re: What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

kevinr — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:57:34 GMT

When should we use Surf and when should we use Tiles (for example).
When should code be placed in webscripts and when should code be placed in SpringMVC Java controllers?
Pros / cons of using server-side Javascript and Groovy as your scripting language.
Apparent duplication in request mapping information when SpringMVC controllers are used with webscripts. In SpringMVC, request mapping information is handled using the @RequestMapping annotation, while in webscripts, this information is found in the descriptor files.

1. A matter of personal choice, obviously we are promoting Surf as that's our area of expertise and that's what we are using to build current and future web-apps. We feel Surf+WebScripts gives you the best and most complete rapid develop framework for building web-apps that consume data from Alfresco.
2. WebScripts mean that you can place you logic into easy to modify JavaScript files - for hot deploy at both development and even production time. Also it's easier to package a webscript as a bundle of text files rather than having controller code in embedded in Java classes.
3. Again just a matter of personal choice here I think. The JavaScript support is the most complete as that's what we've used up till now to write our components for Share.
4. It's not duplicated if you keep everything in WebScripts rather than Java, but again it's up to you.

Cheers,

Kev