Thursday, August 6, 2009

Working with Alfresco in Java EE

I've dedicated some serious hours to installing and deploying Alfresco on a MediaTemple (dv) VPS. The result has been a revelation of sorts. It's the big time for open source enterprise content management (ECM) and there's no going back.

Alfresco is like having your own personal cloud-based Google Docs to customize and host as many secure accounts as you like. While set up and configuration are not a cakewalk, it can be done. I took some decent notes on the process, so I will check back in to detail the process of configuring MediaTemple's vps environment.

In particular, I will show a method to set up a new JDK, fine tune Plesk and the Apache environment, and finally modify some scripts in Alfresco with the result of a successful java build.

That aside, the Java EE with Alfresco is a beast on memory. If there is any hidden cost on running the community edition of Alfresco, that may be it.

3 comments:

Jason Lally said...

Please share how you set this up. I'm working on setting up Alfresco in the same environment.

Edgar Maack said...

Hi it would be great if you could share the how-to.

Thanks!

jasonthewolf said...

Thanks for asking for an update. Ultimately I decided to discontinue MT and move to a barebones server environment. It was my experience that Plesk, which MT customarily loads Plesk as a GUI convenience and alternative to CLI simply worked against the command line driven workflow necessary to set up complex apps like Alfresco. I would highly recommend a lean and mean barebones GNU/Linux server, and you will find it much easier to succeed with Alfresco. I use Slicehost currently. Good luck!