Preface

During recent years, we at Sourcesense supported our customers by implementing different system integrations based on open source technology. At Sourcesense, our main goal is to help our customers to choose the best approach for adopting open source.

Sourcesense offers consultancy, integration, high-level support, and training in enterprise-ready open source technologies across four business areas: Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, Business Intelligence, and Application Lifecycle Management. We have offices in four European cities — London, Amsterdam, Rome, and Milan and we are able to offer local, co-developers and near-shoring solutions.

Sourcesense is well regarded in the open source community, contributing to many OS projects through the Apache foundation and JBoss community; we actively look for contributors and committers to hire, and we encourage them to keep contributing to the OS ecosystem. Sourcesense is also one of the exclusive training partner of Alfresco, we are the only one offering official training in the UK, Italy, and Netherlands.

Alfresco 3 is one of the most versatile open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms. This is a real open source alternative to commercial product such as Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum. It is also very well designed and suitable to be customized and extended. The open source adoption allows developers to contribute on the project and that's why you can find more than 240 extensions in the Alfresco Forge.

This book shows you how to build applications on top of Alfresco using all the Web Service interfaces exposed by the product. Alfresco provides services to client applications for manipulating content and for performing additional operations to manage the content lifecycle.

We start discussing about the Web Services API of Alfresco that is based on the SOAP protocol. Then we describe how to extend the REST API of Alfresco using the Web Scripts Framework. Finally, we explain the new specification named Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), it is dedicated to improve interoperability between content management systems. Alfresco was one of the first ECM platforms to provide a complete CMIS implementation. We hope that it could be useful for you to learn this new standard and how you can use it with any CMIS-compliant repository.