Archive for category Architecture

Struts2CmisExplorer is a further web-based CMIS explorer. The lead developer of this client is Nicolas Raoul. Struts2CmisExplorer has also been developed to be forged to Spring.

Now I will write something about the developer of this explorer. Nicolas Raoul is 28, French and living in Tokyo.

He has been working at Aegif (Alfresco partner) for one year, the only foreigner in his company. Aegif was founded by ex-Documentum people when Alfresco appeared, and is the exclusive partner in Japan for Alfresco and Liferay. They contribute localizations and answer questions on the Alfresco Japanese forum, among other things.
They have been following the details of CMIS since June 2009. Their blog is actually one of the only Japanese websites talking about CMIS:
http://aegif.typepad.jp/blog (You need to be able to read Japanese )
Struts2CmisExplorer is their second CMIS-based project.

They realized a lot of companies needed a lighter alternative to the complex full-featured web clients that come with ECM products (for instance the “Alfresco Explorer”). Those juggernauts are great for power-users, but employees are usually provided with a lighter, simpler webapp. Clients sometimes also need a simple interface to check “their” documents (bills, reports, etc).

Those interfaces are basically showing the files of a particular directory, embedded into the company’s portal, and are usually developed for a particular ECM product.

So they wanted such a reusable browser, that they could easily integrate into any client’s portal, working with any ECM product. For the repository protocol, the choice was not hard. JCR could have worked, but CMIS is much more promising for document management. Even though most proprietary ECM products don’t support it yet.

For the UI library, they chose Struts2 because it is one of the most widespread enterprise web frameworks. Companies will not be afraid of using Struts2, and chances are they already use it. They brainstormed about the name, from monster names to totally abstract names, but finally settled for Struts2CmisExplorer, a plain and simple concatenation that leaves no ambiguity.

Struts2CmisExplorer was born to be forked. For instance some people will probably need to integrate it with Spring IoC, and Nicolas would love them to create a branch for this. He uses GitHub for source control, which makes branching/merging easy and visual.

About Nicloas: He released his first open source software in 1998, then studied maths and IT. He has worked in 14 countries and speaks 6 languages.
Projects: He worked on the French Air Force’s Document Management system, then on French National Library’s central document management system. He designed a part of the Schengen Information System (Europe polices database), and worked on HTML5 at W3C.

Struts2CmisExplorer is open source and available at http://code.google.com/p/struts2cmisexplorer/.