Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 12. Understanding the Surf Framework

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Introducing Spring Surf

• Understanding the general concepts for scriptable Web applications

• Viewing Spring Surf examples

Surf is a scriptable Web framework that powers the presentation-tier rendering capabilities of applications in the Alfresco application suite. These include Alfresco Share, Alfresco Records Management, and both authoring and presentation tools for Alfresco Web Content Management.

This chapter will guide you to an understanding of building Web applications using Spring Surf. It begins by covering some of the essential concepts behind a content-driven design and then moves on to discuss the architecture. It covers Spring Web MVC (Model-View-Controller) and describes how this pattern facilitates the design and delivery of Web pages. The chapter includes code and examples that help to tie all of the concepts together.

The material presented in this chapter is applicable to any Spring Surf application. You could use it to build your own. That said, you're going to use this material starting in Chapter 15 as you extend Alfresco Share.

WHAT IS SURF?

Surf provides a way for you to build user interfaces for your Web applications using server-side scripts and templates. No Java coding, no recompilation, no server restarts, and no heavy lifting.

The result is reduced complexity and lower costs. Surf follows a content-driven approach – everything is content on disk. Scripts and templates are just simple files on disk. ...