Thought stream

As I was thinking of implementing customized filterable datalists in Alfresco, my focus shifted to RoR. I had heard about RoR being simple scripting language that would help me in converting my thoughts to machine-actionable instructions! With the hope of creating the list in an hours time, I quickly committed myself to RoR inclusion. RoR comes with its own set of problems. First the RoR examples that work with older version dont work anymore with 2.3.4. The latest version 3.0 was not available for download. Anyways, I downloaded, Aptana's RadRails 2.05 and started my experiments. RoR promotes convention over configuration. This looked very interesting and promising. I had to struggle to get proper libmySQL.dll to get connected to my MySQL server. It seemed that Ruby 2.3.4 does not work with latest dll of MySQL (learnt from posts across the net). Finally, I was good to go. Indeed, I could get my first application (CRUD) in just 2 hours. Here are my initial opinions on RoR. I ...

With regard to Alfresco, I am trying to use Alfresco share capability to enable small and medium companies to have their own collaborative ECMs. I feel, Alfresco Share is decent enough to do the job. I am using 3.4b version. I have done look and feel change to the theme, the changes are kept to color and logo only. Even though the layouts can be tampered, I feel and suggest not to tamper with. Alfresco share uses FTL for UI layouts and JS for providing dynamic behavior to the UI. One needs to spend a lot of time to in decoding the links between context files to do even the smallest adaptation that may be required. Once, you know how to read and related context files, then this exercise becomes pretty easy. I hope, that good documentation may ease the process, if you go for enterprise edition. It is important to understand the business intent before jumping guns on customization. For example, the firm wants to maintain the daily recruitment tracker to find out how many candidates ar...