WSF Architecture

[mt44555]

Hi every one,


I am using alfresco WCM 2.1 with wsf 1.5 demo.and using evaluation guide. But first i want to know the WSF architecture (diagramatic will be useful) to know the outlook of wsf by that a normal developer can develop his/her own wsf website. I searched for this every where but i am unsucessful so please provide the information regarding this…

Thanks in Advance 

[pmonks]

WSF is just one example of how to implement a site using the Alfresco WCM functionality - it's by no means the only way to implement such a site.  With that in mind, WSF 1.x is basically a simple JSP based web application that uses a number of content types (XML schemas) for handling editorial content as well as the navigational hierarchy for the site.  It also makes use of renditioning templates for some of these types, reducing the rendering load in the runtime environment.

WSF doesn't require or constrain the deployment and runtime architecture in any way (with the exception of requiring a servlet container in the runtime environment), so it's a good way to experiment with different deployment topologies etc.

What other architectural questions did you have?

[mt44555]

HI Pmonks,

Thank you for u reply,we are evaluating this WCM.I have explored that demo.war file it is slightly following JSF Concepts, am I right ?, another thing is if i built the war file using Struts 1.x or webwork or spring framework will it work for me.

[pmonks]

WSF 1.x is an MVC model 1 application, so I wouldn't necessarily describe it as being JSF-like.  😉

With one exception (detailed below) Alfresco is completely agnostic to the type of web application you're managing - it doesn't even have to be Java based.  So to answer your question, yes, we support Struts 1.x, Webwork (Struts 2.x), Spring MVC and many other frameworks besides, including ones that aren't Java / J2EE based.

The one exception is that the virtualisation server (which executes your web application in a virtualised environment to provide in-context preview for your content authors) is based on Tomcat, so if your app uses non-servlet-container technology then the virtualisation server will not be able to serve it.  For this reason we've added an alternative mechanism that leverages deployment to provide in-context preview via an external system (which could be anything you like - PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, …) - see http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Deployment#Live.2FTest_Server_Deployment for details.

That being said, we have tested sites based on Struts 1.x and Spring MVC (amongst other things) via the virtualisation server and those two worked fine - I don't know if we've tested Struts 2.x yet, but I would expect that it would work fine too (most Java web frameworks run fine inside the virtualisation server, provided they don't get too tricky with custom classloader hierarchies).

[mt44555]

Thank you for your valueble reply. So i can import any kind of website developed using MVC Framework. we have worked on openCMS trying to  to Alfresco. My straight question is this WSF is complete sloution or in development product. Can i integrate this with my existing struts application .
Thank you.