Help in writing a custom application on top of Alfresco

[shlomi]

Hello,

Iam quite new to alfresco and web development in general. We are trying to develop a simple application that deals with alot of contents, and we chose Alfresco as our content management service.

I also realized that we could actually build our own application over alfresco, rather then our own application that uses Alfresco's API as a backend. I would like suggestions for the best method to build my application as an extension over Alfresco. My application (at least for now) is quite simple, there is one main space, with some contents (and subspaces), and there are certain operations that can be performed over the chosen space. I dont want my end users to see any alfresco operation and menus, and I want the main form to have different pages on it.

The best way I thought about doing this was to implement a dashboard that will call different jsp's for different pages, and make it unchangeable by the users.

Is this the way to go? Is there a better way?
please advise me on this matter, so I can make the best out of this wonderful piece of software.

Thanks alot,
Shlomi

[kevinr]

Using the dashboard is one solution yes. It is possible to call the dashboard directly via URL (which you could give out to your users) and then configure the client to use a different "container" JSP i.e. one without all the Alfresco menus and adornments. This would then restrict them to the dashboard page, to which you can add what ever dashlets you want. In 2.1 it is possible to configure what dashlets are displayed on all user dashboards by default on first login.

In the dashboard you can make use of the new Web Scripts feature to build highly interactive UI on top of our Templating API and JavaScript API. There are some example dashlets using the new features as part of the 2.1 install - take a look at the DocList and MyTasks dashlets.

It is also possible to use webscripts and templates directly via URL, so you could build the whole UI as a collection of webscript pages rather than use the Dashboard if you prefer.

Hope this helps,

Kevin