Will Alfresco work for my company

[shaunstone]

My company is a web travel company.  we display approximately 40 hotels per page using tapestry 5 on the front end and jboss for the app server.

We would like to have the business be able to update the metadata (description, photos, etc) for the hotels using a CMS system potentially alfresco.

but looking at the examples it appears that the primary usage is to render entire pages and larger formatted pieces of data. would alfresco be able to just return say 40 unformatted pieces of data back to our app?
and if so what would be the best way to get that data back to our app? via a web service call or is there a cleaner method.


I appreciate any light you can shine on this.


Thanks

[zaizi]

We've done just this using Alfresco for a client in the travel sector. I also know of a some large travel sites that use Alfresco for their CMS.

How you implement the solution- (i.e. using Alfresco WCM or just Alfresco DM) will dependent on your requirements.

[nicolasraoul]

Hello shaunstone,

I think Alfresco's "Web Scripts" feature is what you are looking for.
It can return fragments of web pages, by querying the repository.

Each web script is easy to write (server-side JavaScript) and it returns the format you want, typically HTML but I have seen it can send JSON too.
See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts_Examples

From your app's main web page, using AJAX you would call the Web Script using a simple REST URL.

I don't have much experience with Web Scripts, can anyone confirm?

Cheers!
Nicolas

[mrogers]

Yes web scripts are your first choice here.   You can either return fragments of HTML or its probably better architecture to return data which is then formatted in your web app.   For example you will find that the way that Share works is to call repo web scripts that return data in JSON format which Share then formats, combines with other pieces of data and displays a full page.