Alfresco

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What is Alfresco?

Alfresco is an open source Enterprise Content Management system.

It's primarily implemented in Java, suited to a number of environments including J2EE and brings together the best of other open source projects in order to provide a complete set of Content Management solutions.

It is not tied to any particular web browser, operating system, application server or database.


Alfresco concentrates on content management in areas like

Document Management
Records Management
Image Management
Web Content Management





Ease on Alfresco use
Deploys as a complete working content management application
– Runs like a typical web application
~ Application server
! User interface
! Repository
~ Persistent back-end
! Database
! File system
~ Any number of web browsers
! No client installation costs


Alfresco architecture :

Based on Java platform

Spring framework used for dependency injection & cross cutting aspects
Security enforcement
Multilingual functionalities on content and metadata.

Alfresco has used OSS components and integrated them with Spring
Full text indexing ~ Lucene
database independence/persistence layer ~ Hibernate
Web pages generation and navigation ~ JSF
Document transformation, Meta data extraction ~ Imagic, Openoffice
Templating ~ FreeMarker, XSLT
Workflow ~ JBPM
Scripting ~ Rhino Server Side JavaScript, PHP integration on Server side and client side

Internal API structure
The API is structured around services
Service = lowest API level you should interact with Node Service, FileFolder Service, Authentication Service.

Alfresco Web Architecture:

Application server houses both the Alfresco Application & Alfresco Repository.

Storage of data and content is provided by persistent back-ends such as a database or file system



The Alfresco Repository provides a set of reusable cross-cutting Content Management services such as content storage, query, versioning and content transformation.

These services may be utilized by multiple applications

Support for
DM - Document Management
RM - Records Management
WCM - Web Content Management
~ Currently only uses subset of repository services
~ Adds complex layering and versioning support for sophisticated web production


Key Foundation Services

Alfresco Repository is responsible for the storage and retrieval of content

The following 3 services makes the base:
Node Service
Content Service
Search Service