Twelve days ago, I checked out Alfresco.
I thought Alfresco would be a good way to get access control sorted out. There are a number of other features in Alfresco which might prove interesting down the track, but access control was the immediate priority. Alfresco provides each user with a home directory, and lets invite other people to access their resources.
I also think that plutext-style document collaboration would be a great fit for many of Alfresco’s customers. Like most other document management systems, Alfresco uses the classic check-out/check-in model (detested by users the world over!). plutext collaboration frees users from that paradigm.
By Monday, a week in, plutext was basically working with Alfresco. This included the Word 2007 add-in authenticating itself when it makes web service calls (something I hadn’t implemented before). I found a few little bugs in Alfresco which I reported (here and here), but everything was going remarkably smoothly.
Sweet, I thought I’d have a relaxed Tuesday, checking the code in, updating the build and wiki, before declaring success in a blog post.
Well, that wasn’t to be. It turns out there are some major issues (here and here) with Alfresco’s JCR support and/or repository which need to be resolved. Its not so easy to identify simple test cases, since they seem to arise when a series of operations are performed in one session after another, and manifest themselves sometime later, but at least the problems are repeatable.
Hopefully the Alfresco guys will get onto these problems quickly. Otherwise I will have to learn more about Alfresco internals and its use of Hibernate than I’d care to!
Early next week (a week later than I expected) I will update the build procedures so you can easily build it for Alfresco, and then I’ll make sure it works with Jackrabbit again (we’d like to have a single content model that works for both repositories – more on that later).
If we can make good headway with the issues in Alfresco over the next week, we’ll probably regard that as our flagship configuration. If not, I’ll take another look at building access control around Jackrabbit. Although Jackrabbit lacks Alfresco’s bells and whistles, my experience with it (in the single user load scenarios which are causing Alfreco problems) was trouble free. That’s not to say I expect it to be perfect under heavy load, but it sounds very promising based on what Jukka wrote recently following the announcement of version 1.4.
