Alfresco integration with current Spring/Hibernate/Acegi app

[derrickhackman]

I am looking for some feedback from those that have integrated Alfresco with applications that are build on a similar stack (Spring,Hibernate,Acegi etc…). I have been working on a custom application that employs the same fundamental technologies as Alfresco and now I need a CMS 'tool' to manage automatic content generation as well as user-provided content. I was looking at the community version of Alfresco as a snap-in to solve my CMS requirement yet am a little unsure of its ease to integrate with my application. As a side note I have also been evaluating JNuke as a CMS solution but it is a bit unstable at this point.

Given your experience with Alfresco, how easy or difficult is it to integrate with another application? The level of integration I need will make it look seamless in my app; therefore one application context, using one configuration for Acegi, a single Spring context and a single configuration for Hibernate…   I will also need to manipulate the skin of Alfresco so it can have navigational links and events that will operate against my application.

What have done and how have you tackled integration of Alfresco with other Spring-based applications?

Thank you in advance for your time and ideas/thoughts.
-Derrick

[flin]

I think that you are looking for to use Alfresco Embbeded in your application.

If the answer is 'Yes thats it!' I can tell you by my own experience that it is easy to use it inside your site. (I'm using Hibernate + Spring at my existing application.)

I made some customs dataModels (to meet the customers requirements I needed more info in each fila / folder) and I'm using Alfresco API to everything.

It works perfectly. Making searchs using lucene, creating, editing or deleting folders or contents… Easy and powerful.
The point on this is, I'm not using Alfresco Webclient. I may start Alfresco at another context, pointing to the same alf_dir and manipulate the content (without my customizations) and use the editing features of it. But in this case the user needs to login again in alfresco, there are options to make a SSO, but i didn't test it yet.

[derrickhackman]

Is there an embedded version of Alfresco that can be used?? I assume I will need to connect to SVN and pull from the repository the files that I will need to make this work. Is there any documentation on the files that I will need? I connected to SVN but there is a lot of directories and I assume I will not need them all.

Thanks again
-Derrick

[xmaniac]

I can be downloaded from SourceForge. Just one point, the product versions Alfresco uses are sometimes outdated.

[flin]

Derrick, download Alfresco SDK from site.

For more instructions take a look at Wiki:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_SDK


[]'s

[derrickhackman]

Guys, thanks for your help. I have the SDK and it does look like this is what I need. I am going to investigate further and perhaps come up with more questions….

I assume the SDK gives hooks into searching with Lucene search..?

[flin]

Yep!

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Search

[marcus]

Guys, thanks for your help. I have the SDK and it does look like this is what I need. I am going to investigate further and perhaps come up with more questions….

I assume the SDK gives hooks into searching with Lucene search..?

In essence, the downloadable Alfresco package is a JSF web application that uses the same embedded alfresco repository that you get in the SDK download. So, any functionality that you see in the standalone web client is merely an exposure of functionality found in the underlying embedded repository.