What is the future of Alfresco WebStudio?

[heydenb]

It is clear to me that the future interface is Share. There is still a lot of work to be done, but Alfresco keeps investing in this Share interface.
Share is based on the Surf platform which is donated to SpringSource, so I guess it's Alfresco's intention to go further with this Surf platform.

What I am missing today as a developer who would like to start playing around with Surf and Share, is some good old fashioned documentation. There are a lot of pages on the alfresco wiki about these topics, but I don't find a starting point which gives me a save feeling that so I don't get lost. Some tooling would be nice and also just a plain simple download of the surf platform. Now I need to start from the latest build from source.

So, I was thinking. Maybe the Web Studio is just what I need. I don't like the drag-and-drop, and the build-your-site-in-20-minutes ideas, but if Web Studio can generate me some kick-start examples, that would be great.
But in community release 3.2, Web Studio is not available in the downloads anymore and I don't hear much about it either. So I wonder if Web Studio is still alive? And what are the plans with it for the future.

Another bold question I have is about Surf itself. The power of Alfresco is that it is based on a lot of proven open-source technologies. So the wheel is not re-invented. Now Surf seems like a lite weight MVC framework, build on top of Spring, based on scripting. It should allow easy and fast development. However, there is a proven open-source technology which is out there for a couple of years now and which is exactly that. And then I think about Grails. So why invent something new from scratch?
I love the web-scripts in the Alfresco repo, but I don't see any advantages on the view (surf) side of web-scripts compared to Grails components.
I know that I am probably too late with my remarks and Alfresco will probably not move to Grails because I told so, but this is a community forum and this is just my feedback. I think it's a missed opportunity. Grails already has a good community and a lot of documentation.

[chrisb]

I would also be interested to hear what the plans for Web Studio are going forwards, especially with regards to inclusion in the enterprise offering. Is Web Studio likely to become part of the enterprise distribution, and if so have any time scales been discussed / agreed?

[difranr]

I would love to hear the answer to this as well.

[mrogers]

<Disclaimer,  I may be an alfresco engineer, but I'm not involved with Web Studio>

Have you noticed on Alfresco HEAD that the "Web Studio" project no longer exists?

Its not quite as dramatic as that sounds because it has simply moved over to Spring.

However that probably does mean a little loosening of control over WebStudio from Alfresco's part.    And I suspect it means that Web Studio will not be part of Alfresco Enterprise. 

That, I hope, will not stop web studio from being useful for the Enterprise and Community versions, but let's see how it works out.     I would hope that it means that you can become more directly involved with WebStudio and I look forward to seeing how it works.

[ajmillar]

Alfresco now seems to be championing the SpringSurf framework that utilises Roo for building surf based applications. The documentation that is included with it is a lot more detailed than anything that came with Surf (thankfully) and makes Surf a little more penetrable which has been its major failing up until now. SpringSurf integrates with Eclipse and provides a nice little IDE, although much of the functionality of Roo is still through the console. Alfresco just needs to provide a bit more documentation about how to utlise their built in web scripts and they are going to have quite a powerful platform that will take off big time when/if CMIS is eventually widely adopted.

Check out http://www.springsurf.org for more information.

[darryl_staflund]

Alfresco now seems to be championing the SpringSurf framework that utilises Roo for building surf based applications. The documentation that is included with it is a lot more detailed than anything that came with Surf (thankfully) and makes Surf a little more penetrable which has been its major failing up until now. SpringSurf integrates with Eclipse and provides a nice little IDE, although much of the functionality of Roo is still through the console. Alfresco just needs to provide a bit more documentation about how to utlise their built in web scripts and they are going to have quite a powerful platform that will take off big time when/if CMIS is eventually widely adopted.

Check out http://www.springsurf.org for more information.

I am hoping, too, that the Spring Surf team will create a lot more documentation describing how to integrate Surf into SpringMVC, for Surf is now one component of the larger SpringMVC technology stack and learning how to use it properly given its place in this technology stack is important to using it effectively.  Questions I'd like to see discussed would be the following:

• When should we use Surf and when should we use Tiles (for example).


• When should code be placed in webscripts and when should code be placed in SpringMVC Java controllers?


• Pros / cons of using server-side Javascript and Groovy as your scripting language.


• Apparent duplication in request mapping information when SpringMVC controllers are used with webscripts.  In SpringMVC, request mapping information is handled using the @RequestMapping annotation, while in webscripts, this information is found in the descriptor files.

[kevinr]

When should we use Surf and when should we use Tiles (for example).
When should code be placed in webscripts and when should code be placed in SpringMVC Java controllers?
Pros / cons of using server-side Javascript and Groovy as your scripting language.
Apparent duplication in request mapping information when SpringMVC controllers are used with webscripts. In SpringMVC, request mapping information is handled using the @RequestMapping annotation, while in webscripts, this information is found in the descriptor files.

1. A matter of personal choice, obviously we are promoting Surf as that's our area of expertise and that's what we are using to build current and future web-apps. We feel Surf+WebScripts gives you the best and most complete rapid develop framework for building web-apps that consume data from Alfresco.
2. WebScripts mean that you can place you logic into easy to modify JavaScript files - for hot deploy at both development and even production time. Also it's easier to package a webscript as a bundle of text files rather than having controller code in embedded in Java classes.
3. Again just a matter of personal choice here I think. The JavaScript support is the most complete as that's what we've used up till now to write our components for Share.
4. It's not duplicated if you keep everything in WebScripts rather than Java, but again it's up to you.

Cheers,

Kev