Alfresco Maven Artifacts

[rleuthner]

We are really beginning to regret investing time in working with Alfresco products.  Making a profit off of the product is reasonable to expect, but calling this open source and then making the source for particular community releases impossible to recreate, then removing all of the artifacts from the maven repo related to developing against particular versions is complete crap.

Upon delving in to a CMS project we researched many options.  Alfresco technology seemed to be among the better alternatives.  Contact with the sales force was, however, dismal.  It took weeks to get lukewarm responses, eventually finding out that even with the purchased options our target configuration was "not supported" and therefore even as a paying customer we couldn't get what we wanted (recent version running on glassfish against an Oracle database).  That alone is ridiculous - glassfish is, after all, the reference implementation of the JEE .

Trying to get any help from the forums has been completely worthless.

There are even reports that open source licensing changes are being/have been made.  Somehow I doubt these changes will benefit those trying to work with the products.

[mrogers]

This appears to be only your third post, so I think that's a little harsh.

No Alfresco Community is not supported on Glassfish or Oracle. There is a community article on the wiki about Alfresco on Glassfish however reference implementation or not, its not as common as Tomcat or Jboss or WebSphere.

I'm not sure we officially support Maven and that's probably why there are problems.    Clearly that needs to change.

You should be able to build the source, what's the problem?

I'm not aware of any "License Change" since the move to LGPL.   Perhaps if you could give details then it could be discussed.

[rleuthner]

M Rogers, thanks for responding.

No Alfresco Community is not supported on Glassfish or Oracle. There is a community article on the wiki about Alfresco on Glassfish however reference implementation or not, its not as common as Tomcat or Jboss or WebSphere.

Oracle database is pretty common.  Surprising, then, that only has an outdated community amp since target platforms are based upon common use.  From my research there seems to be a lot of interest in the glassfish platform.  I did use the community article + information gleaned from other sources which allowed me to get it running; however one of my prior forum postings describes why it is not working well enough for even evaluation purposes.

I'm not sure we officially support Maven and that's probably why there are problems.    Clearly that needs to change.

Ok, great.  It won't be herculean to straighten out the repository, maybe inconvenient until/unless your build itself maven based.  I found other forum posters who also expressed frustration with the problems in your public repositories, and didn't seem to be getting any response from Alfresco or community.  Let's chalk the disorganization, redundancy and paucity of artifacts up to a lack of implementation - you're right, I shouldn't construe malicious intent.

You should be able to build the source, what's the problem?

Fine, if you want to build unknown quantity at head.  What's your integration schedule?  Why aren't there any tags for the releases?  Please correct me if this information is indeed available.

I'm not aware of any "License Change" since the move to LGPL.   Perhaps if you could give details then it could be discussed.

Another one my annoyance pushed me a little overboard on.  If I can dig up what gave me this impression I'll post it; chalk this one up to carelessness for the moment.

And one thing I forgot to mention - the documentation is in something of a disarray; multiple versions, not clearly labeled, and not organized in a common structure for the various (community) releases makes for a tenuous journey evaluating or attempting to prototype anything.

Our investigations into using Surf, for example, proved totally fruitless due to problems with the respository and documentation - although I understand this has been handed off to springsource, which normally runs a pretty tight ship.

Thanks again for responding.

[mrogers]

Oracle database is pretty common.  Surprising, then, that only has an outdated community amp since target platforms are based upon common use.

There was a business decision that there needed to be some difference between the community and enterprise versions.    So the community versions only support open source  databases (mysql and Postgresql).  I think you will find some of the discussions in the forums with community members suggesting this approach.    However there's nothing to stop the community developing amps as indeed happened.

From my research there seems to be a lot of interest in the glassfish platform.

Well if there is interest from enough customers then it will get added to the list of supported stacks, that's how it works.   Personally I've never known anyone running Glassfish in production.

Why aren't there any tags for the releases?  Please correct me if this information is indeed available.

Indeed I do not know why there are no tags available, however I assume there is a good reason. :roll:   What I do know (since I make sure its correct for each release) is that each community release has a release note on the wiki and that release note has the public subversion revision number.     That's certainly the case for all community releases in the last couple of years.

And one thing I forgot to mention - the documentation is in something of a disarray; multiple versions, not clearly labeled, and not organized in a common structure for the various (community) releases makes for a tenuous journey evaluating or attempting to prototype anything.

I think we all know there is an issue with the community wiki.   However it is precisely that,  a community wiki, where anyone can contribute.  One of the issues I have is that not enough community members get stuck in correcting what they see.
The alfresco docs team does not get involved since they concentrate upon the "official documentation" which is available from docs.alfresco.com.  I'm not sure what the solution is. To ditch everything and start again would remove lots of good stuff.   And to "close" the wiki seems like a wrong step for an OpenSource company.