Web project development and WCM

[jukka]

Hi,

It is often mentioned that with Alfresco you should use your favorite IDE as usual when. How ever, could someone share their experience on how they have set up tools like IDE (Netbeans, Eclipse, JBuilder etc.) or Ant/Maven to work together with WCM when it comes to developing your webapp and using WCM to manage changes, deployments, content repo etc.

Take the following scenario for example:

- a version control system (e.g. CVS) is typically used to store your project
- you use Maven/Ant (with or without IDE) to build your project
- you'd like to use WCM to handle your change sets to the web project and deploy changes to production site(s)

So the question is: how to keep working with your favorite tools and add WCM into the cycle to better manage e.g. the deployment process - without introducing a huge overhead? Practical examples please.

Thanks!

[pmonks]

There are at least two options in this case:

1. Add a target to your build script that deploys a build of your web app to a Web Project in a given Alfresco instance (thereby being able to leverage Alfresco's deployment functionality to deploy your content and code assets as a unit to your delivery environment).


2. Use Alfresco WCM for managing and deploying your content assets but deploy your code assets as per normal (using ant / FTP / wotnot).  In this model your code assets never get stored in Alfresco (which may complicate in-context preview, but certainly doesn't eliminate it).

Either way you would still develop the code for your web application exactly the same way that you do today ie. each developer would have one or more working copies checked out on their local machine, would be editing, compiling and testing changes to that code in a local environment and would then commit those changes back to the SCM tool once complete.  Alfresco (deliberately) doesn't impose itself on the development process.

Cheers,
Peter

[ben_tse]

Peter,

Can you give some pointers on how to get in-context preview to work in your second solution?

Regards,
Ben

[pmonks]

There are a number of options, and they're described at http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=11845.

Cheers,
Peter