Alfresco

by **jpfi** » 04 Jan 2008, 10:40

Hi,

Along with a colleague I played around with Web Scripts and extjs (a fabulous ajax lib).
After a couple of days we've finished a first prototype of a ajax-based Alfresco repository browser - we named it opsoro.

You find a flash screemcam here: http://opensource-ecm.com/opsoro/opsoro.html

This Web Script API is truly first-rate! It is impressive to find out how easy and rapid to develop things can be;-)

by **Xerox** » 04 Jan 2008, 11:16

Nice layout,features....
very impressive...

by **paulhh** » 04 Jan 2008, 11:32

Very cool, very impressive!

Our hope was that Web Scripts would make it much easier for people to build their own apps or customise ours. I think this is one of the best demonstrations of that.

Cheers
Paul.

by **paulhh** » 04 Jan 2008, 13:09

How long did it take you to develop this?

Extjs would not be an easy library for us to use ourselves because of licensing, but there are other toolkits such as Tibco's GI toolkit that is BSD/Apache.

Cheers
Paul.

by **jpfi** » 04 Jan 2008, 13:47

Hi,
first of all: Thank you for the complement.

Well, we started from scratch in both technologies (Alfresco WebScripts and extjs).
If I draw-off some days because of the learning curve of the technologies I would estimate ~10 days.

The client side only consists of ~1000 lines of custom javascript + Icons, CSS & some html.

On the server side we were able to reuse some builtin webscripts. So, the server side consists of 7 custom WebScripts with.

Extjs has an extremely impressive api and widget collection. I don't know if Tibco's GI toolkit can compete here.

We also take a look at the eclipse RAP Project (http://www.eclipse.org/rap) and qooxdoo (http://qooxdoo.org). I'll invest some time in the next few weeks to develop a similar client using Eclipse RAP (I'm a total fan of this OSGi stuff ;-)

).
Cheers,
jpfi

by **Simon** » 04 Jan 2008, 14:53

Impressive... Any idea about the performance of this approach, is it slower than the native interface?

by **jpfi** » 04 Jan 2008, 20:01

Hi Simon,

Thanks!
I think it is rather faster than slower.
Thru the WebScript Architecture you get a web-style scalability.
Even though there is a lot of javascript on the client-side a modern browser seems to be performant enough.
The screencam was taken on 2 GHz Laptop with 2 GB RAM running Alfresco 2.9B. There are ~5GB and ~5000 docs in the repo. Firebug reports ~50-150 ms for an AJAX-request and extjs seems to be very fast handling the response (it's all JSON) and updating the GUI.
But we didn't any deeper performance tests yet.
Cheers,
Jan

by **rscheele** » 09 Jan 2008, 11:57

great interface.. are you going to share this with the community?

by **jpfi** » 10 Jan 2008, 09:17

Hi Rob,

We are somewhat surprised of the positive response to our prototype.
We are currently discussing in what manner we will do further development of this prototype. There are several options, one is to set up a forge project.
I'll post the result of this discussion as soon as possible.
Cheers,

Jan

by **dmatejka** » 10 Jan 2008, 11:01

hi jpfi,
I want to add want more congratulation.. it is really the way we would love to develope our front end for our employees.

Would be awsome if you set up a forge project for this.. please inform of any result.. we will wait... :wink:

by **rscheele** » 10 Jan 2008, 19:23

Yes, please forge, this is the true power of open source and open standards.
What is Alfresco's point of view (especially gui designers) of the opsoro project?

by **MikeH** » 10 Jan 2008, 22:06

rscheele wrote:What is Alfresco's point of view (especially gui designers) of the opsoro project?

We like it for a number of reasons:
- it shows how quickly completely new and exciting user interfaces can be created using webscripts and third party Javascript libraries
- it shows how our "out of the box" webscripts and UI elements can be re-used in completely new environments
- it shows that the direction we're heading in for our future UI development (more AJAX, and other "Web 2.0" paradigms) is the correct one, and one which Community members are excited about

And finally, we're encouraged that people are spending the time and effort creating these innovative user interfaces using Alfresco!

Thanks,
Mike

by **maxtsai** » 13 Feb 2008, 07:03

perhaps that Alfresco can consider include this UI in the future release ..

by **protenus** » 20 Feb 2008, 16:35

rscheele wrote:Yes, please forge, this is the true power of open source and open standards.
What is Alfresco's point of view (especially gui designers) of the opsoro project?

Would be great to see that on forge. We are working on similar interfaces, and would love to be able to contribute.

by **jpfi** » 19 Mar 2008, 14:11

Hi,

the decision is made, opsoro will follow its own name "OPen SOurce ROcks" --> It's Open Source.
We'll contribute opsoro as an forge project soon. We'll also set up a a dedicated project site (opsoro.com).
I'm not so far to communicate a fix first release date, but two or three weeks sounds realistic, I'm just back from holiday ;-)

I'm confident that we're able together with the community to deliver a nice alternative approach using alfresco.

Stay tuned!

Jan

PS: I'll be in Barcelona: http://www.alfresco.com/about/events/20 ... emea-0408/

Alfresco

Prototype: Alfresco Web Scripts + extjs ajax lib

Prototype: Alfresco Web Scripts + extjs ajax lib

impressive

very impressive

Opsoro Forge

Re: Prototype: Alfresco Web Scripts + extjs ajax lib

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