Written in english, as it may concern more people. About a week ago I was at the Alfresco Surf Code Camp hosted by Optaros in Munich. The speaker was Jeff Potts, who is also the author of the only usable documentation for Alfresco as well as the Alfresco Developer Guide. Alfresco Surf is the new platform for developing web applications with Alfresco. Its main advantage is the independence from the repository, so it may run on other system providing a real separation from content and presentation layers (but also posing a new performance loss - more on that later).
The setup was a virtual machine on which we developed our applications. A pretty sleak solution, which did not need any real alfresco setup (only scp up our changes to the vm).
The presentation slides were very good, Jeff talking is also pretty nice. However big parts of the code camp were only copy & paste stuff and test it afterwards. I think it would be cooler if you would hand out some half finished app and let people hack more around it, but I think thats a matter of taste. After hacking from 9am to 4pm we dove into discussion. First about Surf, second about Alfresco in general. This was the most interesting part of the day. Surf is not really usable for the stuff I want to do at my company, also it merely seems to be one other big xml mess, where a relational database would be more than sufficient. However, as it seems to replace the JSF client sooner or later, it will also gain more users (by force more or less). Second about Alfresco. My primary concern was performance. Performance is a major issue with Alfresco and of course is worse when running Surf on another system. However I dug quite deep into performance optimization and caching in Alfresco, only to find out, that noone plans to develop anything there (thanks to a direct skype connection to one of the alfresco developers). My current solution to improve performance is to use ehCache to store loaded elements from the nodeService when doing freemarker rendering (this is where I need performance). If I find the time I will elaborate on that.
All summed up, it was a very nice day, with enough meals and coffee as well as Alfresco information. Kudos to Optaros for hosting this. Soon there seems to be some Spring day in Munich, which I hope to attend as well.
