RIA and Semantic Tech for Enterprise

HOW TO: FlexSpaces in Liferay IFrame portlet

screencam video demo

I just tried a quick test of running FlexSpaces+Browser in a Liferay IFrame portlet. It worked! All features of flexspaces worked:

• Doc library, search, tasks, wcm views
• Drag/drop of files between dual panes, internal cut/copy/paste between spaces
• File upload, file download, file viewing, preview, play video
• Checkin, checkout, edit, cancel checkout, update, make versionable, version history panel
• Icon, thumbnail, grid list, cover flow view modes
• Search, advanced search, tag cloud, category navigation
• Create space, properties edit, tags/categories edit
• Make pdf, make flash, start workflow
• Coming flexspaces 0.8 features with Calais integraion (auto-tag, manual semantic tag properties edit, multiple semantic tag clouds)

Issues noticed: works best when portlet maximized, when not, doesn’t use full portlet area, when switching portlet between regular and max size looses login, liferay dialog not always on top of iframe/flash. Things might work better with the Liferay Flash portlet.

(Update 8/16/09: Added short term state save/restore in SharedObject of ticket/doclibPath/tabIndex in FlexSpaces. Now works much better (don’t loose login, view state when resize portlet. Used Liferay Flash portlet instead of IFrame portlet. Also Liferay dialogs z order was fine. Also would work with flexspaces webapp installed in either Liferay tomcat or in Alfresco tomcat (just different Flash portlet swf url config) )

Didn’t try more integrated approaches yet:
Webscripts as Liferay portlets on ecmarchitect.com
Full Integration of Liferay 5.1.2, Alfresco 3.0 E, SSO, LDAP
Use Liferay Flash portlet instead of iframe portlet

Config used: Alfresco enterprise 3.0 in one tomcat, Liferay 5.1.2 in another tomcat, windows vista

How to:
0. Install Alfresco enterprise or labs
1. Normal install of flexspaces+browser flexspaces dir in alfresco tomcat webapps area, flexspaces+browser 0.7
2. Flexspaces webscripts installed in alfresco, flexspaces 0.7 webscripts
3. Install separate liferay + tomcat bundle from liferay.com
4. I changed all the ports in liferay tomcat conf/server.xml to start with 9 instead of 8 (9080, etc.) to not conflict with tomcat running alfresco
4. Start alfresco tomcat
5. Start liferay tomcat and login test@liferay.com (password: test)
6. With liferay “Add application” add a IFrame portlet from the Sample category
7. Configure the portlet to have the source url: http://localhost:8080/flexspaces/FlexSpaces.html
8. Title of portlet can be changed to “FlexSpaces” by clicking on “IFrame” text in the title and editing
9. If portlets of the FlexSpaces individual views instead of all 4 views in one portlet, (or 2 views only in one portal, etc.) the srcUrl args doclib=true&search=true&tasks=false&wcm=false to FlexSpaces.swf can be used like in the flexspaces 0.7 page site components for share (See FlexSpaces Share integration blog post with screenshots)

Steve

Here is a sneak peak video of  semantic auto-tagging and multiple semantic tag clouds coming in the next release of FlexSpaces+AIR / FlexSpaces+Browser. This uses the  Calais Integration  Alexander and  I have been working on, the Open Calais service, and Alfresco.  The Calais integration auto-tag action can also be used from the “run action” UI in the Alfresco web client (now called Explorer).

Things in the works: Flex UI for tag suggestions, storing URIs in the integration for future linked data use, storing geo-location info from Calais 3.1, and map UI to display geo-location points to filter search results.

The Calais integration amps including web scripts are in the Calais Integration forge project. Note we may use the Semantics for Alfresco merged project for certain pieces in the future. A google code project, semantics4alfresco has also been reserved.   Current FlexSpaces downloads are in the FlexSpaces forge project. Its svn is in the flexspaces google code project.

Steve