Create content in a blog engine and have that content show up in Alfresco transformed to a predefined canonical form.

Motivation
Blog users, not necessarily within the corporate wall, can author content using familiar tools of choice (like WordPress), something would pull that content into Alfresco. If that content were to be pushed through some approval process then pushed from Alfresco to some content delivery infrastructure, say the corporate web site, then effectively any external blogger can contribute content to a website without the need for VPN setup nor corporate accounts.

Assumptions
Assume a setup where Alfresco is already being used to store enterprise content and it already has a model for content representation. Furthermore there exists a publishing mechanism to push that content to the edge for serving.

Solution
Obviously the first thing to do was to look at what Alfresco has out of the box in terms of blog integration. A quick look at the code shows something related to blog integration, and the wiki explains:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Blog_Publishing_User_Guide

This basically allows one to take a piece of content within Alfresco, add some blog specific meta-data to it, and publish it to Typepad or WordPress. This is the reverse of what I was trying to do, so I had find another way.

Basically, the problem can be distilled to: Pull new blog entries from one or more blogs, transform the content to the designated canonical form, then store in Alfresco based on rules (more on that later).

The first thing that came to mind was to check if Mule had an RSS or ATOM transport, and indeed it does. Mule has a community transport for RSS that is able to pull down an RSS feed into ROME feed objects, the transport can be found on the Mule Forge here: http://mule.mulesource.org/display/RSS/Home

All that was needed then is pull down the feed, split it into messages, one message per post. Run it through an XSLT, easily done in Mule, and drop the transformed blog entries into Alfresco over CIFS.

However, that left me with 2 problems: (i) the blog poller needs to be idempotent (don’t pull down the same blog entry twice); (ii) handle custom namespaces/custom fields in the feed.

The first problem was addressed by writing an idempotent receiver inbound router. The router quite simply remembers the date and time of last blog post it received and uses that to pull down newer posts only.

The second problem was a bit tricker to solve. Extending ROME with custom modules is certainly possible, and though it would solve the problem of pulling in custom fields, it’s a bit cumbersome and I would have to update these modules every time the RSS feed source fields change.

What I was really after is segmentation of the RSS feed into individual blog posts, and the transformation of those individual snippets of XML into a predefined canonical form.

So all I really needed was to write a simple XML feed splitter. So another simple outbound router that splits the RSS XML feed into individual posts and a couple of transformers that transform messages from XMLByteArray to JDOM Document and back is all it took to make it happen.

Mule pulled everything together quite nicely with an HTTP connector polling periodically for posts, an XML Splitter segmenting the RSS feed with an idempotent router insuring only new posts make it through. Next was an XML transformation responsible for transforming the blog posts to the canonical representation, and finally a file transport to drop the blog post into Alfresco.

Should be a great show.

– Next Generation Web Applications with JBoss Seam, Richfaces, AJAX, Facelets, Portal, and more.
– Integration and SOA with JBoss’s new SOA platform that includes JBoss jBPM, ESB, and Rules
– Core technologies such as EJB3, Hibernate, and Cache
– Security and Management of large-scale, enterprise deployments

This is the largest JBoss World event yet, with almost 800 attendees. In our booth we’ve been showing off new web applications built with JBoss Seam/Facelets backed by the Alfresco content management platform and jBPM. Definitely a lot of excitement about using these technologies for next generation Enterprise 2.0 applications.

Working with the outstanding team at Kaplan, we used the JBoss Application Framework (including JBoss Seam) and the Alfresco Web Content Management platform to dramatically improve web operations, increase website performance, and decrease cost.

 Read more about it here.

It took IBM/Filenet over 25 years  to get close to this number of installations, whereas Alfresco has done it in 2 years.

What an awesome testament to the power of open source.

Register for it here.

In it, we talk about how open source ECM and portal software can help with fundamental document management requirements including:

• Rules based repository that can replace shared network drives
• Effective search and retrieval
• Standards based interfaces, including WebDAV, FTP, CIFS
• Library services
• Forums and other ways to facilitate team collaboration beyond email
• Workflow
• Scanning and document imaging support
• Records management
• Security

You may find our recent Technical Note useful: “Alfresco By Example – A Simple Introduction to Alfresco’s WCM API”

Feel free to download the package (as a zip file) from here. All source code is GNU GPL.

Here’s the intro:

We provide a few simple working examples that illustrate the use of new APIs included in the Web Content Management (WCM) module in Alfresco 2.0. Our purpose is to demonstrate a small portion of Alfresco’s underlying capability that will be useful to developers who are just starting to use (or starting to evaluate) Alfresco for dynamic web site content management and content delivery. We assume the reader has some familiarity with Alfresco 2.0 and its WCM features; for those who do not, we recommend reading Alfresco’s WCM Tutorial first.

Continue reading here.

A sneak peek:

As Records Management continues to migrate onto the desktops of business users across the enterprise, and as new laws and regulations stipulate how content should be stored, classified, and destroyed, organizations have become caught in a profound business transformation.

Records Managers and IT personnel struggle to meet the day-to-day needs of rank and file employees creating and sharing content while dealing with highlevel challenges such as compliance, e-business initiatives, and knowledge sharing.

Legislation demands that enterprises manage the proper control, classification, storage, auditing, and disposition of records. General business users, however, prefer to continue their reliance on shared file systems and e-mail to productively manage and share content.

Adding to these problems is that up to now, traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems have been costly to implement and difficult to use. Enterprises of all types – from government agencies and financial institutions to insurance and healthcare companies – can benefit from a robust yet simplified approach to records management.

First off, what is the difference between MPL and GPL?

Well, a primary difference is in the reciprocity requirements. The GPL requires that any derivative work of the original software program be licensed under GPL, whereas the MPL requires only that modifications to one of the files containing Original Code or previous Modifications or a new file containing Original Code or previous Modifications must be released under MPL.

In other words, if GPL code resides anywhere within your end software solution/product (i.e., is compiled in), the entire software code base must be licensed under GPL. In contrast, you may combine/compile MPL code with closed-source code as long as your closed-source code does not mix with the MPL code at the file level.

The bottom line: any OEM or end-user who wants to build a solution using Alfresco Community (GPL) must also release their entire software source code base under GPL. Alfresco provides an exception to this if it involves software licensed under an OSI approved license by virtue of Alfresco’s Free/Libre Open Source Software Exception.

If you are an OEM or end-user who wants to ensure that your modifications, extensions, and customizations to Alfresco remain closed, well that’s where Alfresco’s Enterprise license comes in — it waives the reciprocity requirements of the GPL. This dual-licensing approach to open source software is very common (e.g., MySQL)

So now there are two (independent) reasons to purchase Alfresco Enterprise:

1) Support – to get responsive support and consulting help from Alfresco and their certified partners like Rivet Logic

2) GPL Waiver

Other thoughts:

• Alfresco is now truly open source as defined by OSI and free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation (“free” as in “free speech”).
• And as a result, Alfresco’s community should grow much larger. According to John Newton (Alfresco’s Chairman and CTO), this effect has been immediate.
• Look for more Alfresco integrations with other open source projects.

A great move in all respects.

Organized by Russ Danner of The Monitor (well done Russ!), the discussion included formal presentations and q&a, informal discussions over lunch, and a roundtable of hot topics. The roundtable discussion included the pros & cons of Alfresco’s various APIs (Foundation vs. JCR vs. Web Services), architectural deployment options and the need for more specific concrete examples from real-world deployments, thoughts about example applications that could illustrate the power of Alfresco’s capabilities, and ideas for fostering more dialogue within the Alfresco community.

Sumer presented an architectural overview of Alfresco’s repository, and his presentation is attached here.

Here’s Russ Danner talking about open source community:

And here’s Sumer discussing Alfresco internals: