Author: Hashim

I am asking this question to myself for sometime, unfortunately I could not find time to investigate it because of other important(!) stuff I had to do. I even asked the same question to a consultant while interviewing him for a project. The answer was; There is not a particular way of doing it, but I am sure it is possible up to some context, since Alfresco is Spring based, blah blah blah. So I…

I hate the fact that every project is building their own HTTP abstraction on top of some library, sometimes java.net, sometimes commons-httpclient but always a custom implementation that depends on something different. Currently I am trying to implement a Constaint on Alfresco that can get the allowed values from a controlled vocabulary service via HTTP. First I tried to use Alfresco’s own abstraction to deal with HTTP calls in order to facilitate the existing code-base.…

Ruby is arguably the most meta-programming friendly language of the current dynamic languages since it has no compile time at all, and most constructs in Ruby are available at runtime. Simply, there is no distinction between the code you are writing and the code that your computer runs, and you can change the code that your computer is running at any time you want. Is it dangerous? hell yes. Does this prevent me doing it?…

While coding in a hurry, you sometimes use internal API’s either willingly –since you don’t want to spend more time– or unwillingly instead of public equivalents. I am saying don’t use them because they meant to change, as the name implies they are for internal use. Just today, I spent three hours just to replace these kind of codes after upgrading Alfresco to 3.3 from 3.2 for a project I am working on. Those who…

Waaah, too boring to test is too boring to write. I just wanted to start with this quote from Ray Ryan in Architecting GWT applications for production at Google session at Google I/O 2010. This really explains how I feel about extending Alfresco. Actually it is worse than that, writing tests for Alfresco extensions is painful rather than boring. While developing extensions for Alfresco, I often find writing even the simple unit tests unnecessarily difficult.…