Displaying uploaded content from a portlet

[rsfeir]

Hi,

We're evaluating Alfresco, love the ease of installation and the UI is very clear and usable.

The one thing that was not immediately obvious is how to perhaps implement the follow usecase:

We have a portal, JBoss Portal, and in this portal we have content.  Right now the content sits in plain html and txt files and we need to edit them manually.  When I tested the JBoss CMS portlet, which doesn't compare at all to this product (and as a matter of fact JBoss pointed me to Alfresco), they had a portlet which allowed me to display the content that I had uploaded or created in their CMS.

Is there a way to do this in Alfresco?

Basically:

1- Upload or add a new document and edit
2- Add a portlet to a page in my portal and configure the portlet to display a specific piece of content from the Alfresco CMS.

So is there such a portlet already created?

if no, is there an API which would allow me to create one which will do what I need?

Thanks in advance.

[rsfeir]

Ok so in our case it sounds like we should be using a webservice.  The repository availability is something we need to look at, and if the repo is not available, I have no issue consuming cached content, but if the repository is not available and we use WS, even cached content won't be there if we only have one cms install.

I'm getting a much clearer idea about all this, and your support and response speed and clarity of answers has been truly amazing.

Thanks
R

[rsfeir]

Ok one final question before I drive down the WS road.  Is it possible, both License wise and integration wise, to take your war file and somehow drop it into the jboss deploy directory, or perhaps the protal sar directory and have your classes be part of the same classloader the jboss portal runs on?

The reason I ask is because if I can have Alfreco exist in the same classloader, then it would be very easy for us to use the JCR solution.

One way I thought of doing this, and this is where the licensing issue may arise, is to simply explode your war file, and merge its contents with our own portal code, then the whole thing will load in the same classloader and we're good to go.  However, this will also cause a headache down the line since everytime we want to update, we'd have to merge your new code with what we have, and that's not soemthing we want to do.

So I'm hoping there is a little trick there which might make it do the magic we need.  If not the WebService solution is certainly great and will do the trick very nicely.

Thanks again.
R

[rdanner]

I dont follow.  I may simply be missing something.  Alfresco implements the JCR. It has it's own impl alfresco.jcr.repository.RepositoryImpl.

I dont understand what difference it will make if alfresco is in the same class loader unless some configuration behind the JBoss porlet is set to load the alfresco implementation.

Also if JBoss has functionality that relies on the level II of the JCR then you wont be able to plug alfresco in to that space.  Alfresco V1.0 doesn't support level II.

My oganization will need level II functionality and we are looking at what we need and how much distance exists between what alfresco currently provides and what we need.  Some functionality may exist in the nightly builds (as level II support is underway in the nightly builds)