Alfresco 3 Web Services

• Gain a comprehensive overview of the specifications of Web services
• Implement the Alfresco specific Web Services
• Get to grips with the Alfresco WebScripts and the Alfresco extensible RESTful API
• Manipulate contents in Alfresco using different operations and APIs
• Learn about the CMIS specification and its Alfresco implementation
• Hands-on approach with examples built over the course of the book

In Detail

Alfresco 3 is the leading open source enterprise content management system that offers powerful features for interacting with the content in its repository from outside the system. These include the support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) implementation, reusable web scripts, and a Web Services API.

This is the first book to show you how to use Web Services in Alfresco. Packed with examples, you'll learn how to build applications using Alfresco remote APIs based on SOAP and REST. You'll see how to use different APIs and bindings such as WebServices, WebScripts, and CMIS.

Alfresco 3 Web Services starts off by showing you the services exposed by the Alfresco Web Services API, and how the API fits into the Alfresco software architecture.You learn to develop your application firstly by setting up and testing your Java development environment using the Alfresco SDK in Eclipse IDE and secondly by associating the Alfresco source code and Javadocs in Eclipse.

With the help of real world practical examples, you learn how to do things like create, sort, and call Web Scripts, and invoke remote calls to Alfresco repository. To get the most from the Web Services API, you need to know about the basics of the Content Manipulation Language (CML), and the book takes you through this.

Examples such as the bookshop application show you how to sign in, change user sessions, get, remove and change public and private associated contents, manage a cart for your e-commerce application, and so on.Next, by implementing a Microsoft .NET application using the Alfresco Web Services API, you see how to perform operations against the repository from your .NET application. The book provides you with REST and SOAP concepts, their comparison, basics of the FreeMarker language, Atom Publishing Protocol, JavaScript controllers, and the Apache Chemistry project.

By the end of this book, you will be able to put together your knowledge about CMIS and the Apache Chemistry toolkit to develop a complete working application that uses Alfresco, via CMIS, as a back-end storage. Last but not the least, this book also covers the WebServices security profiles - the best practices for Web Services to promote better interoperability.

A step-by-step guide to implementing the SOAP API, Web Scripts, and CMIS.

What you will learn from this book

• Gain a comprehensive overview of the specifications of Web services
• Learn how to manipulate contents in Alfresco using different operations and APIs
• Build applications on top of Alfresco using Alfresco Web Services API
• Extend the Alfresco RESTful API using WebScripts
• Make your own different output renditions using FreeMarker
• Explore the CMIS specification with all the details about the Alfresco implementation
• Learn how to contact Alfresco with your client using one of the bindings of CMIS
• Make your CMIS integration more standard using the Apache Chemistry project

Approach

The book is a detailed guide to building integrations on top of Alfresco filled with tons of examples and sample code. It is intended to be a complete overview to help developers choose a specific API with related method invocations.

Who this book is written for

If you are a web developer who wants to build business applications on top of Alfresco, then this is the book for you. Basic understanding of XML, Web development concepts (HTTP, MVC) and Web Services is required.