Alfresco dines out on framework extensions
Open source process automation, content management and information governance software company Alfresco has hit the version 3.0 iteration for it ADF 3.0 (Application Development Framework).
Company CTO John Newton claims that his firm has added some major extensibility features to Alfresco ADF to simplify building web apps.
The software ADF itself uses the firm’s own Alfresco Digital Business Platform — it provides a set of reusable Angular-based UI (user interface) components and services, command-line tooling and client APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that surface Alfresco process, content and governance services.
“We believe a digital business needs more than a content repository, it needs a Digital Business Platform that developers can extend and customise. Enterprises today need a single source of truth for information across their end-user apps and back-end systems. That’s the power of process-led, cloud-native content management – a single platform to manage, secure, and collaborate on content,” said Alfresco CTO Newton.
Developers will now be able to extend the main ADF components with their own code. This new extensibility mechanism helps maintain code customisations while remaining up-to-date with the latest ADF versions.
Future-proof
By including this new extension framework, developers can isolate their custom work and upgrade (“future proof”) to later versions of ADF without losing their original code.
Alfresco has rewritten the Javascript API in Typescript so that packaging of App Source Codes is optimised for better performances. Typescript, designed for large app development, is also supported by Angular and uses it as its primary language.
This is said to ensure performance improvements of ADF apps when deployed in production.
Alfresco’s ADF 3.0 also now supports the newest version of the cloud-native, open source BPM project, Activiti 7.0.
With the support for Angular 7.0, developers will gain access to the performance improvements and several major improvements and new design features comprising virtual scrolling, drag and drop etc.