Alfresco development frameworks: ADF & Aikau
Hi everybody.
If you are starting to develop Alfresco, I am pretty sure that you have a lot of information but you don’t know where can you start working on. What is Alfresco Development Framework ? What about Aikau? What should I use? If you have these questions, this post is made for you 😉
No worries, we are here to give you the key points. Let’s take a look in deep which options have you got now a day to develop or extend Alfresco products and what are the purposes of these options: Aikau and Alfresco Development Framework (ADF).
Aikau goals:
- Created for Alfresco 4.2 and next releases.
- Based on dojo libraries.
- Provide a library of fine-grained, decoupled widgets that completely encapsulate all of their function, styling and localization behavior.
- To make it easy to unit test those widgets across multiple browsers.
- To reduce the complexity of Surf rendered pages by removing Page, Template and Component configurations and replacing them with pages defined by an easily customizable JSON model in the JavaScript controller of a single web script.
- To be able to dynamically build pages both for and within the running UI and render them without restarting any servers.
- To provide a foundation on which our business partners and customers can build their own solutions.
In short: Extend Alfresco Share (pages, creating components, etc..).
How may I start?
ADF goals:
- Created in Alfresco Community 201606 Early Access with new v1 REST APIs and next releases.
- Standard technology (Angular 2)
- Reusable components
- Rapid Application Development
- Responsive (!)
- Feature-based clients, exposing functionality to perform a specific task(s)
- Role-based clients, exposing functionality based on role
- Clients where the UI layout and style differs significantly from the Share layout and styling
- Mashup clients
In short: If you want to build from scratch a responsive custom app, this is your choice!
How may I start with ADF?
Once we know that we need to use ADF for our custom application, what’s next step? Take a look into these links:
- Anatomy of an ADF application
- Video tutorial introduction (really cool)
- Getting started with ADF
- ADF examples
- Creating your first application
- Any doubt? Ask on real time here!
OMG! There’s too much things to learn!! Don’t panic my friend… Basically when you are starting to develop in alfresco and you don’t know which framework you should use, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you using Alfresco 4.2? Do you need to extend Share UI? – You’ll need to use Aikau Framework
- Are you using Alfresco 5 with new APIs? Do you need an app from scratch? Responsive? – You need to use ADF.
I hope now you have a better idea about these two frameworks and at least you know how to start working with them.
See you next time!!