Prototype: Alfresco Web Scripts + extjs ajax lib

[jpfi]

Hi,

Along with a colleague I played around with Web Scripts and extjs (a fabulous ajax lib).
After a couple of days we've finished a first prototype of a ajax-based Alfresco repository browser - we named it opsoro.

feature overview:
- ria-feeling (sortable & movable columns, view/hide components, async loading…)
- live Search (search as you type)
- folder browser
- category browser
- tag cloud browser
- My Alfresco portal (draggable portlets)
- document tagging
- embedded preview (crop content & image preview)
- inline view (text, pdf, images … IE only: ms office et. al.)

You find a flash screemcam here: http://opensource-ecm.com/opsoro/opsoro.html

This Web Script API is truly first-rate! It is impressive to find out how easy  and rapid to develop things can be;-)

[xerox]

Nice layout,features….
very impressive…

[paulhh]

Very cool, very impressive!

Our hope was that Web Scripts would make it much easier for people to build their own apps or customise ours.  I think this is one of the best demonstrations of that.

Cheers
Paul.

[paulhh]

How long did it take you to develop this?

Extjs would not be an easy library for us to use ourselves because of licensing, but there are other toolkits such as Tibco's GI toolkit that is BSD/Apache.

Cheers
Paul.

[jpfi]

Hi,
first of all: Thank you for the complement.

Well, we started from scratch in both technologies (Alfresco WebScripts and extjs).
If I draw-off some days because of the learning curve of the technologies I would estimate ~10 days.

The client side only consists of ~1000 lines of custom javascript + Icons, CSS & some html.

On the server side we were able to reuse some builtin webscripts. So, the server side consists of 7 custom WebScripts with.

Extjs has an extremely impressive api and widget collection. I don't know if  Tibco's GI toolkit can compete here.

We also take a look at the eclipse RAP Project (http://www.eclipse.org/rap) and qooxdoo (http://qooxdoo.org). I'll invest some time in the next few weeks to develop a similar client using Eclipse RAP (I'm a total fan of this OSGi stuff ;-)).
Cheers,
jpfi

[simon]

Impressive… Any idea about the performance of this approach, is it slower than the native interface?

[jpfi]

Hi Simon,

Thanks!
I think it is rather faster than slower.
Thru the WebScript Architecture you get a web-style scalability.
Even though there is a lot of javascript on the client-side a modern browser seems to be performant enough.
The screencam was taken on 2 GHz Laptop with 2 GB RAM running Alfresco 2.9B. There are ~5GB and ~5000 docs in the repo. Firebug reports ~50-150 ms for an AJAX-request and extjs seems to be very fast handling the response (it's all JSON) and updating the GUI.
But we didn't any deeper performance tests yet.
Cheers,
Jan

[rscheele]

great interface.. are you going to share this with the community?

[jpfi]

Hi Rob,

We are somewhat surprised of the positive response to our prototype.
We are currently discussing in what manner we will do further development of this prototype. There are several options, one is to set up a forge project.
I'll post the result of this discussion as soon as possible.
Cheers,

Jan

[dmatejka]

hi jpfi,
I want to add want more congratulation.. it is really the way we would love to develope our front end for our employees.

Would be awsome if you set up a forge project for this.. please inform of any result.. we will wait…  :wink: