Why yet another one and not re-use existing (OpenCMS, Apache Lenya …) enterprise ready CMS? C
Since there was man doing things, there has been men (mankind) saying I can do it better. The question is not why but rather why not?
Alfresco is not simply another open source cms. It aims at being an open source cms that can realistically compete with the enterprise commercial players.
Why another app container? Why another template mechanism? Why another language. Options breed competition and competition breeds innovation.
I agree And reading through Alfresco code I must say they picked best architecture components quite wisely.
They use Spring because they want the AOP features, and they use them. They do inversion of control and unit testing. They have the advantage to built upon 2005 technology while other Java-CMS did not have this possibility, and are stuck due to backward compability. Of course Alfresco will be outperformed by the Java-CMS that will be based on 2008 technology in a few years (Deep Thought vs. Earth Mark 2)
For instance Magolia wants to implement a good MVC infrastructure in their v3.0 and it's a major refactoring effort for them, while Alfresco is already based on it.
If the SOA and web service thingy works out,… I'm not to convinnced. But I have to admit it's smart marketing by them to give it an implementation shot.
Alfresco Java infrastructure looks like someone read the O'Reilly "Better, faster, lighter Java" and said "that sounds good, lets make it this way."
Alfresos CMS infrastructure on the other hand is a bit too "full scale".
