[ANN] maven-alfresco-extension-archetype 1.0.0 released

[Gabriele Columbro <g....@sourcesense.com>]

Hi devs, hi users,
my first post on maven lists (after several months in read only mode) to announce the release under Apache2 license of an archetype to build Alfresco [1] customizations with maven2. It was developed within Sourcesense [2] and provides the framework with a full m2 based lifecycle management.

You can find it on Alfresco forge here [3] or documented on Sourcesense repositories here [4].

As some of you may know, Alfresco is gaining a very nice market position with respect to the (even commercial) Enterprise Content Management alternatives and it's based on all opensource components, so we thought m2 could make a real improvement in the development and delivery of Alfresco (and the debate is lively on Alfresco forums, see [5] and [6]).

That's why we decided to put effort in hosting a m2 repo layout for this project (which still not builds with maven) and provide it with all the  
(genius, have to say that :) capabilities that m2 provides for managing the whole application lifecycle (especially in enterprise contexts).

Basically this archetype provides (with zero conf remote creation hosted in SS mvn repositorites) the following features amongst others:

- Property filtering
- Rapid prototyping (common properties already available to the - junior - developer rather than Spring conf files)
- Releasing
- Documentation site
- LDAP configuration samples
- Local/remote deploy on tomcat/jboss with cargo
- jetty embedded run
- ant support: ant mimics 'mvn package' behavior and produces a customized war

which represents to me a great added value to manual procedures and ant based scripts (ant is supported anyways).

The archetype has launched in the Alfresco community pretty recently so we'll see which feedback it can get, but it was to me a really important use case to prove maven flexibility and feasibility especially for complex environments: now the next steps will be to push Alfresco to build "itself" with maven, as ATM customization dependencies (WAR and JAR) are not produced by a m2 build process.

Wrapping up, I'm writing (cross-posting actually, sorry for that) to both lists for :

- users :
if any Alfresco developer/partner gets interested and wants to provide feedback/suggestions on this one. Any help/comment would be delightful :) BTW, Source code is released together with archetype jar here [7], but an SCM will be opened soon in Alfresco forge (or Sourcesense repositories). 

- devs  : 
to notify them of a possible typical complex maven use case (similar to the Apache Cocoon m10n which I followed pretty close) and maybe to see if there's still the possibility of a brief (BOF or Fast feather) talk about this experience / success story at the ongoing ApacheCon (I'm based    
in Netherlands). I will file the super late request to the organizers, but as a mere suggestion, do you think anyone can be interested at all? ;)


Thanks and hope this helps. 

BTW, as per my first post, keep on the wonderful work you've been doing. Maven is an awesome piece of software.


Ciao!

Gabriele


PS:
Should this mail be sent to the announce mailing list or that's maven releases specific? 



[1] Opensource Enterprise Content Management - http://www.alfresco.com
[2] Sourcesense - Making sense of opensource - http://www.sourcesense.com
[3] http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/m2alfresco/
[4] http://repository.sourcesense.com/maven2-sites/maven-alfresco-extension-archetype-1.0.0/
[5] Maven for building Alfresco - http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=7619&p=39188#p39188
[6] Library conventions - http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1017&p=39172#p39172
[7] http://repository.sourcesense.com/maven2/com/sourcesense/alfresco/maven-alfresco-extension-archetype/1.0.0
-- 
Gabriele Columbro
Sourcesense - Making Sense of Opensource (http://www.sourcesense.com)
(+39) 3201612846
(+31) 627565103
Open Source Software Engineer - ECM Specialist (http://www.mindthegab.com)


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