Preface

Alfresco is the leading open source platform for Enterprise Content Management. The progress the Alfresco Engineering team has made since that first production release in June of 2005 has simply been amazing. The platform is well on its way to fulfilling its vision of becoming a viable alternative to those from legacy vendors who simply cannot keep up with the pace of innovation inherent in a solution assembled from open source components.

This book takes you through the process of customizing and extending the Alfresco platform. It uses a fictitious professional services company called "SomeCo" as an example. SomeCo has decided to roll out Alfresco across the enterprise. Your job is to take advantage of Alfresco's extension mechanism, workflow engine, and various APIs to meet the requirements from SomeCo's various departments.

Although many customizations can be made by editing XML and properties files, this book is focused on developers. That might mean writing Java code against the foundation API to implement an action or a behavior, maybe creating some server-side JavaScript to use as the controller of a RESTful web script, or perhaps implementing custom business logic in an advanced workflow. The point is that all but the most basic implementations of any ECM platform require code to be written. The goal of this book is to help you identify patterns, techniques, and specific steps that you can use to become productive on the platform more quickly.

By the end of this book, you will have stepped through every aspect of the Alfresco platform. You will have performed the same types of customizations and extensions found in typical Alfresco implementations. Most importantly, when someone comes to you and asks, "How would you do this in Alfresco?", you'll have at least one answer and maybe even some source code to go with it.