Is it possible to embed Alfresco Community Edition v3.4

[dkitipov]

Hi everybody,

What I am trying to research is:

1) if it is possible to embed Alfresco Community Edition v3.4 into an existing application. I found a webinar "Why & How to Embed Alfresco" that states Community edition cannot be embedded. Nevertheless I am not sure for which version this webinar is relevant to.

2) Why I think that I need to embed Alfresco?
My intention to embed Alfresco Community Edition in an application is motivated by the willing to use directly JCR API calls from the application to Alfresco. Since I expect my Spring application to be collocated with the Alfresco Community Edition (embedding it) I think the best communication channel is using direct Java/JCR API calls?
I can see that there are some additional solutions like using Web Services (WS), but it seems to me WS is not appropriate for the scenario I am trying to create. Both the application and Alfresco are written in Java and both are collocated.
Additionally, I want to use standard APIs and specifications (but not Alfresco specific ones) to communicate with Alfresco. Thus later when I add additional/different ECM I will be able to reuse my existing functionality.

Thank you in advance!

Regards,
Dobri

[mrogers]

Yes you can embed Alfresco.   At least one of the examples in the SDK does this. 

You should probably also look at CMIS instead of JCR.

[dkitipov]

Thank you for the fast answer.
I suppose you mean the "SDK AlfrescoEmbedded" project in SDK? I thought this is only for test purposes and that I should download something like Alfresco for embedding or so to do a real one?

Can you refer me to a documentation that gives some guidance how to embed Alfresco Community Edition (I will call it ACE) into an existing application? Should I use the artifacts from the SDK directly or I should download a dedicated version of  ACE used for embedding.

Last. Do you recommend using CMIS instead of JCR?

Thanks for your answers in advance. I am trying to evaluate Alfresco for a project.