Hello everyone!
The Alfresco Dynamic Website community project has been a large focus of the company's efforts over the past two months. We've essentially taken it and split it into two projects (one which is the User Interface / GUI and the other which is the Dispatching engine).
The dispatching engine is now completely integrated into Alfresco 3.0. This means that Alfresco 3.0's new Web Client as well as other future Alfresco applications (such as our own Network product, under development) will use this dispatcher to describe pages, templates and components. This is known as Alfresco's Web Framework and it has provided a foundation upon which we can build web applications based on reusable, lightweight technologies like Web Scripts, Freemarker and JavaScript (client and server side).
Thus, the Web Framework portion is fully integrated and will be part of the 3.0 Community and Enterprise releases.
Along with this effort, Alfresco has also begun to invest time to develop a proper front-end UI layer. This UI layer consists of a JavaScript model and a library of functions for working with remote content, describing interactions between client-side components and things like that. Our goal is to have a common library so that our community and customers can build components, templates, themes, pages and all kinds of things that are easily swappable and reusable.
In fact, to be somewhat assertive, our goal is to make it so that our users can swap and install components with simple drag and drop actions. Since everything is based on Web Scripts and Freemarker, we can handle all of the dynamic loading and installation. All of that, without any server restarts.
In terms of ADW, this means that we're presently reworking the Ext dependencies into our new client-side UI framework. The main reason is that we want to give our users a single way to develop components without binding them into a particular UI framework. We also don't want to prevent them from using a particular framework. And, as noted, there are unfortunate licensing issues with Ext that made it impossible for us to bundle it with our distribution.
The timeline for an Enterprise release of ADW is about to be announced. The 3.0 team has been making incredible progress and we're very excited about how our various efforts have merged around a consolidated experience. ADW, in that sense, will position as a "visual design tool" (if you will) for adjusting or customizing existing Alfresco web applications. It will also, of course, allow you to build brand new web applications from the ground up.
Indeed, one interesting objective to ponder is the idea that Alfresco Dynamic Website could be used to build the Alfresco 3.0 web client. Provided that you already had the components in a library, you should be able to drag and drop them into place and build the very same application (or customize the look and feel to your preferences).
Stay tuned!
Michael
