The first preview of this technology is available at the end of June 2005. This release demonstrates a new approach to content management, such as the ability to connect to the repository as though it were a shared drive in your network and an access and control that content through an easy to use portal interface based upon specifications JSR-168 Portlet and JSR-127 Java Server Faces. By making the source code available, it will be possible to see our approach to Aspect-Oriented Programming as we use the popular Spring framework for introducing incremental functionality to content objects. This lean, modular approach to content management architecture is fast and adaptable and will allow us to add new functionality rapidly. Some of the first features available in this release include:

Modern Repository
The Alfresco repository is an enterprise-scale repository designed to be distributed, federated and scalable. The system is architected to use aspects and Aspect-Oriented Programming wherever possible. This makes it possible to streamline communication between components and to introduce new capabilities incrementally without re-coding. Aspects allow collapsing of communication barriers, introduction of web services, and simplify the use of security, transactions, caching and version control. Use of aspects is controlled using a flexible rules engine that can add new functionality to content automatically, such as classification, meta-data, versioning, locking and translation. Aspects make all aspects of the repository configurable including typing, versioning, process separation and security. Configurable aspects allow shorter, faster communication paths and controllable caching that make the repository extremely fast.

The capabilities of the repository are those found commercial enterprise content management repositories.

• Aspect-oriented - including the ability to add new aspects
• Hierarchical folder structures
• Document types with standard document behaviors
• Metadata - with extensible types and complex properties
• Classifications - Browse or search classifications based upon global definitions
• Rule-driven processing of content to add or modify data or move content
• Automated content processing - including auto-classification, auto-indexing and workflow handling
• Global dictionary - Namespace driven dictionary allows hierarchies and standardization of definitions
• Open authentication - Configuration-driven to use enterprise standards for authentication
• Fulltext indexing and retrieval - Using the Lucene 1.4 engine and content transformation to search many different content types
• Team collaboration spaces
• Versioning
• Locking - a configurable aspect to add locking if necessary
• Content-streaming
• Configuration control - a central point of configuration for all Alfresco features

Standards-based Portal Components
The Alfresco system includes an out-of-the-box portal solution to simplify the development of enterprise and departmental portals. This solution includes a framework of portlets for interacting with the repository. The portlets are developed using the JSR-168 standard and integrate with any JSR-168 compatible portal, such as the JBoss 2.0 Portal. The Alfresco portlets are reusable and extensible to be used in portal applications. The portlets are developed using the JSR-127 Java Server Faces standards, which is a tagged based interface for adding user interface capability simply without programming the user interface presentation. The Alfresco JSF tags can be used in the development of custom portlets. Some of the pre-packaged portlets that come with the Alfresco system are:

• Browsing content hierarchies with multiple, configurable views
• Wizards for administration and creation of content spaces
• Wizards for content handling, uploading and downloading
• Interfaces for version handling and version history
• Interfaces to manage properties of content
• Team collaboration spaces interfaces
• In-line editing of web content
• Desktop integration for seamless launching and saving of content
• Bread-crumb support for navigation
• Easy Navigation model
• A clipboard for saving content work and components
• Query interface to allow users to search and browse content

Shared File System Emulation
To provide easy access to the repository for end users, Alfresco has included emulation of the Common Internet File System standard. CIFS allows users to access the Alfresco repository as though they were accessing a shared drive, permitting off-line synchronization, drive mounting and access from any application. A rules-based engine provides automatic versioning, classification and control eliminating the manual work associated with content management systems. This interface was developed by the developer of JLan, the only Java-based CIFS engine.

Application Programming Interfaces
The Alfresco system is designed to make programming of content management applications easy. As standards emerge, Alfresco will add these interfaces to the repository and make them interoperable with existing APIs. The main API is service-oriented to support web services, other languages such as Perl and PHP, and to provide a stateless, scalable application base. The web services and WebDAV interfaces will be available in the near future. Information on these is available in the preview release.

There will be multiple query models to support different types of searching and information access. The first supported in the preview release are the JCR/Xpath query specification and an extended version of the Lucene query language that allows easier mixing of meta-data and classification searches with full-text searching. We will also support a SQL-based query language in the near future.

Relational Database Support
The Alfresco system uses Hibernate 3.0 to support the mapping of its internal objects to the underlying database. The first database system supported is MySQL. In the future, we will support multiple databases as part of a simultaneous release.