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Any ideia of modularizing alfresco core? Spring OSGI maybe?

jbernab
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Hi,

I have been studying Alfresco, and it´s internal structure and how plugable it is today, and it´s very very powerful and I like it very much.

But I have one objection to the current structure, today is rather monolitic in the way that I cannot see clearly bundles contributing functionalities, clear units of deployment that are self contained.

I worked with some eclipse plugin development and I have been exploring the ideia of enterprise applications composed by osgi bundles, Spring OSGI is going to support this king of model.

One thing that probably would be easier with this kind of structure for instance the WCM functionalities would be a set of plugins that could be used stand alone on the core too, or much easier to mix and match the correct set of functionalities to deploy in a customer or a product.

This is really something for product families and communities, so I was wandering if there is any plan in this direction?

Thanks in advance,
Juan.
2 REPLIES 2

alexander
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
I would agree with Juan.

Alfresco modules are far from ideal  and allow quite little (or none) runtime management. It just modifies WAR file that has to be re-deployed (at least for me).

If OSGi is a too big change may be worth looking at Impala - http://code.google.com/p/impala/

Thanks
Alexander

dbachem
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
I'm wondering that there is only one single thought about modularization and OSGi to be found in this forum. From an architectural point of view there should be a real interest to use OSGi for state-of-the-art component-based development. Beside this, you should be aware frustrating (potential) users getting down into the "config hell"  (http://www.jroller.com/robwilliams/entry/alfresco_and_spring_a_canto). Just do it like SpringSource, Apache Cocoon (Cocoon Blocks) and many other did, bundle your framework!

:arrow:  Read here: http://wiki.bjhargrave.com/local--files/start/TS-5122.pdf

So one important thing is to have a look which subcomponents are yet available as OSGi bundles. There are some interesting movements:
  • SpringSource dm Server: probably the best target platform for Alfresco

  • http://lucene.apache.org/tika/: Tika is a subproject of Apache Lucene packaged in 3 components - core, parsers und app - which are shipped as OSGi bundles.

  • and maybe most of your jars should be available in SpringSource bundle repository
In my opinion you should start a separate migration project, maybe together with Optaros or - this would be interesting - with help of SpringSource company.