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Alfresco Dev Survivors Kit

Over the next few posts I’ll be including some basic information you should have when starting a new Alfresco or Surf framework project. Tips and tricks from the trenches.

Development Environment & Build

First things first, follow the instructions on the Alfresco wiki to get yourself setup: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_SVN_Development_Environment

If you’re mostly creating JavaScript webscripts I’ve found that TextMate (OSX only) is a pretty light alternative to Eclipse (I run both). I use the Ant Bundle and the Subversion Bundle to manage the environment.

Speaking of Ant, after a couple builds clicking on the “Refresh webscripts” button gets really old. To speed up the process I tweaked my build.xml to include a cURL POST into the repository and/or Surf webapps to refresh the webscripts. ( thanks to my colleague Ray for moving the urls into build.properties):

Deploy Surf Webscripts Ant target:

    <target name="deployWebscripts" depends="deploy"
     description="Unzips the ${package.file.zip} into
     ${surf.web.dir} and refreshes webscripts">
        <exec executable="curl">
            <arg value="-d"/>
            <arg value="reset=on"/>
            <arg value="http://${surf.web.url}/service/index"/>
        </exec>
    </target>