At Java One next week, a UK-based new content management player founded by some of the original architects of the Documentum system will unveil their idea of what a next-generation open source successor should look like.

Alfresco, which as diners know means “open air,” is announcing its existence at Java One and will release a developers preview of several early components, including a Java-based portal that complies with JSR 168 (so it could be embedded in any standard Java portal system), and a repository. Initially, the developer’s preview version will ship with the JBoss application server and the MySQL database. Aiming to have a full production version by year end, the purpose of the developer release is to solicit outside input on what elements should go into the repository, the core piece of the Alfresco engine. 

Alfresco CTO John Newton, who was also part of the original team that developed Documentum, explained the difference in approach. “We had a more insular view at the time [when Documentum was developed]. We thought there was this giant database that would contain the content. Today, we realize that content management has to account for the fact that there are islands of content that must get federated.”

The goal is to make content management easier to use and more accessible. “We’re trying to address key problems of content management users, trying to use a file system and portal interface to do enterprise searching and change metadata through a JSR (Java)-compliant portal application,” said Newton.

The hurdle, said Newton, is that it requires the end user to shoulder much of the load of cataloging content that they contribute. In most cases, end users would rather simply mount the content in a shared network drive that appears as a set of master file folders.

Alfresco will use CIFS (Common Internet File System), a Microsoft-originated protocol that has been contributed to the public domain, as a way to make the content system look just like the shared Windows network drive. Although CIFS has been supported by Apple and many UNIX vendors an Internet alternative to the Network File System (NFS), in practice, use has been limited due to its inherent complexity.

According to Newton, who was also part of the team that first developed Documentum, the goal is to reinvent enterprise content management (ECM) “from a blank slate.” Newton sys that Alfresco will be taking advantage of open source and standards-based technologies, such as object-relational mapping, that were not available when Documentum was first created.

A major architectural change, said Newton, is adopting aspect-oriented development, a recent software development technique that is more flexible than object-oriented approaches. Compared to objects, which were conceived when client/server architectures were emerging, aspects are friendlier to federated n-tier environments, where there are different sources of content and different sets of rules that are applied in varying circumstances.

For instance, while object approaches assume inheritance from a master object, aspect-oriented approaches look for commonalities across a broad swath of assets that are organized as “aspects.” For instance, the security measures that are enforced may depend on the type of content, who is using it, and under which scenario. Similarly, display of content may rely on whether the document is displayed on a conventional desktop computer, a laptop with intermittent Internet access, or a mobile handheld device. And an aspect for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX compliance) could be used for adding audit trail rules for sensitive financial content. Rather than inherit from a single model, aspects can be overlaid like business rules for specific types of content or scenarios.

Initially making the content portal and repository available for developers under the LGPL (Lesser Public General License), a common open source license popular with vendors, Newton hopes the attention will also spur development of something like a WS-Content web services standard for specifying content. That would enable systems like Alfresco’s to more easily share content services with other enterprise systems.

When Alfresco releases production product, its main business model will be to sell support and services rather than product, much as open source product suppliers like Red Hat and JBoss do today. According to Newton, they are not aiming at the Documentums of the world, but rather, the small, niche oriented content systems that are typically maintained at department levels of large enterprises.

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