Alfresco Groovy Processor / Flex

Alexander has updated his Groovy processor to work in Alfresco 3.0 (3.0 stable final). Previously it was for Alfresco 2.x. It allows using .groovy and .gsp in web scripts installed in Alfresco.  I will have to try some Flex UI calling Groovy web scripts,  later support server-side customization of FlexSpaces and FlexibleShare with Groovy!.

Update: Here is a link to a 8/19/2010 blog post from Peter Monks at Alfresco

http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/pmonks/2010/08/19/alfresco-and-groovy-baby/

His Alfresco Forge Groovy project using a different approach

http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/groovy/

(no download file, need to be logged into Alfresco Forge then can browse code in svn)

Steve Reiner / Integrated Semantics, follow on twitter

FlexibleShare

Something new is on the way: FlexibleShare

Flex based version of Alfresco Share / Flex based Portal Container  (Open Source)

1. Dashboard dashlet/portlet drag /drop in Flex
2. Portlets in Flex and HTML/Ajax
3. Leverages FlexSpaces components
4. Leverages Alfresco Share (site model, rest apis, surf, dashlets),
5. Additonal Flex components for wikis, blogs, discussions, calendar
6. Leverage Liferay, (supports jsr-168, wsrp) in a later stage
7. Reporting/BI (JasperReports, Pentaho, BIRT)
8. BPM (JBoss jBPM in Alfresco)
9. Desktop drag/drop of files with AIR

Registered a google code project  http://code.google.com/p/flexibleshare/ and an Alfresco forge project http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/flexibleshare/

Note on the name: Alfresco Share and Surf are already “flexible” (in the able to adapt to new situations sense). Also you can implement Share/Surf components/dashlets with Flex  (as I did with the FlexSpaces page site components).  The difference with FlexibleShare is that the container itself is in Flex and the primary way for implementing dashlet/portlet UI is Flex (and Flex+AIR). Surf dashlets and Liferay portlets in HTML/Ajax are still supported.

Also used “Flexible” to sound like the book Flexible Rails (Flex+Ruby on Rails).  With FlexibleShare although the server scripting would tend to be the usual web scripts in JavaScript, also  supporting Groovy/Grails would be interesting and fit in with the Java and Spring use in Alfresco.  The Alfresco forge has a Groovy integration (although it needs some updating for Alfresco 3.0).

Other things: the use of a web-tier Flex compiler (like the Flex plugin for Grails does) could be used to allow Flex forms/UI to be added (and compiled automatically) without having to use a development tool. BlazeDS support like in this plugin would also be nice too for higher performance data transfer.

Update: See description of  FlexibleShare prototyping mentioned in my Genesis / Flex Portals / Open Source blog post.