Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), providing Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging. One of the most boring thing about customize Alfresco was the difficult of configuration of Alfresco SDK. Fancy working with Alfresco ECM or contributing to it, but don't want to waste way too much time in googling ? Alfresco still bases its customizations on custom Ant builds and a hardly manageable and extensible SDK. This consideration makes it definitely not of easy penetration in two very important contexts like: - Enterprise processes : being ECM Alfresco should ship enterprise process level lifecycle management for its modules, with features like dependency management, properties filtering, documentation, release, centralized lib version management, etc. Managing Alfresco custom modules with Maven will provide all the mentioned benefits. - open source mainstream community (e.g. Apache) : due to the convention over configuration based approach to customization, developing an extension too often ends up in infinite unstructured wiki/forum documentation lookup. Using maven archetypes and embedded Jetty appserver run you could have an Alfresco application running with just 2 command lines standard commands. For more information: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Managing_Alfresco_Lifecyle_with_Maven The usage of both maven-alfresco-archetypes and maven-amp-plugin (http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/maven4alfresco) can solve both this issues and bring back Alfresco development to what it should be, i.e. FUN!

I work for Alfresco. Having used the SourceSense plugin for some time now, I can vouch for just how useful it is. Piergiorgio didn't mention that SourceSense are also hosting a Maven repository that contains the Alfresco Labs JARs, making it even easier to get started on Alfresco extension development. We (Alfresco) are currently in the process of creating a similar service for the Alfresco Enterprise releases to our customers. By coincidence we're also in the middle of a fairly major refactoring of the SDK, to better support those developers who wish to use Ant (or other build tools) to build their Alfresco extensions. If you have specific feedback on what you'd like to see improved in the SDK please let us know, either by emailing me directly (sknomp AT ocserfla DOT moc reversed) or by raising a ticket in our JIRA instance (http://issues.alfresco.com/). Cheers, Peter

Hi Peter, thank you for your comment. I would like to mention the man behind this great work of Managing Alfresco Lifecycle with Maven: Gabriele Columbro. Here you can visit Gabriele's blog: http://mindthegab.com/ Thank you Gabriele ;)