During these weeks I started to constantly contribute on the Alfresco Wiki on some of the activities related to the maintenance and the improvement of pages.
Thanks to an initiative started by Jeff Potts to review the wiki contents, during the first call conference, I proposed to create a group of persons that can take care of the wiki and that can solve many of the issues that are reported by developers.
Jeff has agreed with me to create this new group of Alfresco Wiki Gardeners and I think that now we can work together to improve and update the quality of the wiki pages.
A first and important task was done and it was related to the categorization of the pages: now there is a main category that is matched with the table of contents of the official Alfresco documentation.
The most important input for us is the developers feedback.
Each message sent by the developers community that can arrive by email, forums messages, IRC channel or just commenting a post on one of our websites, that is related to the wiki, it could be taken and discussed within the group.
In this way we can understand how we can improve the involved page to solve the problem.
One of these issues that were required more than once was a complete update of the content for the Java-Backed WebScripts Samples page.
This page contained legacy code with some snippets with a clear explanation for all the steps but without showing all the source code. In the top of the page, you found a warning about this legacy and not tested content on the latest Alfresco version.
So in a week, during my free time, I entirely updated the page with content tested on Alfresco 4.0.0 Enterprise and Alfresco 4.0.b Community but I'm sure that it will also work on the latest community version.
I implemented and published a new Maven module on Google Code that allows developers to run on-the-fly all the samples in an Alfresco instance configured with H2 database on Jetty. I added a reference of this new project in the top of the wiki page.
The project is Alfresco Java-Backed WebScripts Demo and allows you to automagically start the Jetty instance with an Alfresco configured on-the-fly:
mvn clean integration-test -P webapp
Or you can execute the AMP packaging of all the samples:
mvn clean package
Or simply you can download the precompiled AMP from the Downloads page of the project.
I would like to remember to all of you that the Alfresco Wiki is based on community contributions and that Alfresco counts on you to update and add new useful contents.