ZK provides Rich User Interface whereas Alfresco is having a powerful content management capability. Hence by
combining both of these tehcnologies we can produce Great Enterprise content and Easy Ajax Empowered presentation
Managed System. This solution is Cost Effective as both of these technologies are Open Source. Also the integration
of these two technologies is also easy and straight forward.
Alfresco Web Scripts framework offers a great and simple way to integrate its content repository with other systems
in our network.Alfresco's Web script allows you to build RESTful API which can be used as a pltaform of SOA
architecture based solution [that provides High Availability and easy implementation.] In reality,you will only
need, at least for the most essential operations, a basic knowledge about Javascript and XML. We can have the
resulting application where content will be managed in the alfresco repository and zk is responsible for presenting
that content.Both of them will be communicating with the help of the web scripts.
Steps to Integrate the Alfresco and ZK.
Create a java Script based web script in alfresco which will simply fetch the content from the alfresco repository.
Create one web application which will contain the welcome page with extension zul(extension for ZK pages).
In welcome page we will call the web script from the alfresco by one of its component,that call lies inside ZK view so what happens is response of web script will be rendered by the ZK and will display the content with its own UI components.
Authentication:
- For authentication we can create one extra page in our web application which will have .zs as extension(similar to .js) inside which we can call the inbuilt webscript of alfresco which is going to return us a ticket.
- We will attach that ticket to the web script URL which we are going to call in our welcome page.
So finally your Alfresco and ZK are talking to each other. Now as per your requirement you can fetch the content from alfresco and display it using ZK.
You can check the Screenshot attached here of the portlet I have created, which gives you an idea about the kind of application we can create with the help of this integration.
In order to give you idea about the kind of application we can create with the use of this kind of integration I have attached the screen shots of the portlet I have created.
Screenshot of application by Alfresco+ZK.
Screenshot of application by alf+ZK
In this application content of portlets are coming from the Alfresco and UI is presented by ZK components. Don't you find it exciting to create portlets in Alfresco.If you find it useful please try to explore it more i bet you will find it really useful and really cool.
By
Mittal Patoliya,
Consultant in CIGNEX, India Office
