Where is the URL to a live website?

[garretgaw]

I'm starting out with Alfresco Labs 3c.  I've got Alfresco installed and have been using Web Studio to build a simple test site.  From there, I've gone into Alfresco and setup a deployment to an ASR.  I deploy the site and it said, "Successfully Deployed".  But now what?  Where do I go to view the site as if I was an anonymous user of the Web?  I understand I'll need to do some reverse-proxy setup in order to expose the site from behind my firewall and clean up the URL, but I can't even find the site from behind the firewall.  I know I'm missing something simple here because I can't find it in any of the documentation or on this forum and this seems like a fundamentally important thing.  Why build a site if no one can view it after it's deployed.   

Any help would be much appreciate.

Thanks.

[garretgaw]

Also, the server I'm running Alfresco (and ASR) on is 192.168.1.120 internally on port 8080.  Just thought that might help with any response examples.

Thanks again.

[garretgaw]

I've noticed 14 people have looked at the question without responding.  If this is a stupid question, please just point me in the right direction.

My site name is Test10 and it's deployed on an ASR on 192.168.1.120:8080.  I tried hitting the deployed site at…

http://192.168.1.120:8080/alfresco/Test10
http://192.168.1.120:8080/Test10
http://192.168.1.120:8080/alfresco/service/Test10

and a multitude of other variations, all with zero luck.

:cry:

[mrogers]

Yours is not a stupid question, but I don't know the answer since Web Studio is brand new and I've never used it.

What I can tell you is that ASR deployment takes your assets and places them in a "live" avm store where they can be accessed by your live web application.   It can be part of a deployment solution,  but will not give you a web server, that's not what it does.  http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/ASR.

[garretgaw]

Ahhh, I was thinking of using Alfresco as a more powerful alternative to all those Web Content Management frameworks like Joomla, Nuke, etc. But if I will need to write the website myself anyway outside of Alfresco, I'm not sure how much value Alfresco would be for a website solution unless it was a huge site (hundreds or thousands of pages) with teams of content creators and approvers needing significant workflows. 

You mentioned that you haven't used Web Studio - it seems that it would be the tool to build the website portion to then leverage the assets.  I'm just not sure how to get the Web Studio "stuff" deployed and usable.

[garretgaw]

I think I've figured out some of this…

1) I've built the alfwf.war (as described here: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Surf_Platform) and deployed it in a standalone Tomcat instance. This appeared to work. 
2) From there, I did a File System deployment of the Web Studio built Web Project to get an "export" of the files created by Web Studio. 
3) Then I unzipped alfwf.war and overwrote the files under al/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco with the files from the Web Studio deployment. 
4) After that I zipped it back up and called it test.war and deployed it in the standalone Tomcat instance.  This deployed successfully.
5) I tried hitting the site using http://192.168.1.120:9080/test/page?p=welcome and got a bunch of Web Script Not Found problems.

I think I'm getting closer… and suggestions?

[pmonks]

<disclaimer>
I've not worked directly with Web Studio yet, but am eagerly awaiting its first release.
</disclaimer>

As I understand it, Web Studio is basically an IDE for Surf based web applications (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Surf_Platform).  Surf sites themselves are a mix of components (implemented as Web Scripts http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts) and a data model that defines how those components get composed together / skinned / etc. to form a final page impression.

The Surf data model is what's managed by Web Studio in the Alfresco WCM repository, and leverages all of the existing features of that repository (including sandboxes, full repository versioning ala SVN, workflow, deployment, etc. etc.).  This data model is in turn "interpreted" by a web application (currently implemented as a J2EE webapp) that knows how to read that configuration information, execute the components (Web Scripts) and finally generate the final page impression.  None of this process is dependent on ASRs - the "interpreter" is a standalone webapp that can be deployed into any standard J2EE servlet container, and it's able to read the data model direct from disk (presumably having been deployed there via an FSR) or from an ASR if need be, or from a sandbox in the authoring environment (ie. for in-context preview purposes of pre-approved changes to the site).

That said, some of the Surf components that are or will be available will have a dependency on ASRs - for example any component that needs to dynamically execute a query to determine what to display will require an ASR (since filesystems aren't too crash hot on the querying front).

So in a nutshell, Web Studio and Surf themselves are not dependent on ASRs, but I'd expect that most implementions will end up requiring ASRs since they'll want the kind of dynamic querying capabilities that only they provide.

Cheers,
Peter

[garretgaw]

Ahh, thanks.  That may help.  So, you're saying that instead of using a hand-modified version of alfwf.war (Surf standalone webapp) that contains my Web Studio files, I could somehow modify the alfwf.war file to "point" to an "Live" ASR deployment of my Web Studio app so that it can utilize any ASR specific Web Scripts, etc.

Cool.  I'll give that a shot.  I'm currently using Alfresco Labs 3c. 

I might be missing some of the documentation somewhere. The Web Studio / Surf solution could definitely benefit from a more friendly approach to deployments than me having to hand-modify an alfwf.war to point to an ASR.

[pmonks]

Yep that's how I understand it's supposed to work.  And yes the documentation is a bit thin at the moment, given that Web Studio is brand spanking new, but I'm sure it'll improve in the coming weeks as the engineers polish off the Labs 3D release, QA commences on the Enterprise 3.1 release, and they free up a bit to work with the documentation team.

Perhaps as you go through this exercise you could update the wiki with your findings?  That'd help the community get started with Web Studio, without having to wait for us to put together the "official" documentation.  I suspect the Web Studio Tutorials page (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Studio_Tutorials) or one of its sub-pages would be the best place to capture this information.

Cheers,
Peter

[garretgaw]

Sounds good.  I'll update the wiki as I get this working.  My current milestone is to figure out how to get Surf (alfwf.war) to point to an ASR…

Thanks for your help.