在Liferay门户网站上使用Alfresco和Jackrabbit CMS的比较

Question

I'd like to know your thoughts about using these two CMS on Liferay. I know, that jackrabbit is rather a framework and reference JCR implementation. I'm more interested in the situation, when you have Liferay portlet and you need a CMS repository other then the liferay Document Library, because you need more features.

What I am concerned about:

• Level of Metadata Extraction from various document formats ( I see that both are using Apache tika parsers)

• Level of Content Transformation - for instance dealing with not quite valid PDFs (OCR)

• How easily can developer extend functionality (for instance implementing various actions on document processing)

It takes a lot of time to try both of them, I have to decide on one and stick with it.

Thank you

Answer 1

I never did anything serious with Jackrabbit, but did quite a lot of projects with Alfresco.

Since there's an ongoing joint effort between Alfresco and Liferay in order to provide a solid and validated integration, Alfresco should at least minimize the integration efforts between the two applications, and possibly have a good starting point for your project.

From the functional point of view, the following apply to Alfresco:

• as you noted, Alfresco makes use of Tika for metadata extraction. By default a number of document types are supported , and adding your own custom metadata extractor is quite easy and well documented.

• Alfresco will make use of Tika for transformations when project Swift (an upcoming version) will be released. As per now, tools like pdfbox and OpenOffice are sitting behind content transformations , which provide good reliability for the average case.

• offering extension points for the repository is something Alfresco is quite good at: you can hook you code upon events on specific content types , configure rules on folders that get triggered upon creation/update/delete of their inner content and so on