Enterprise identity management is a complicated area for organizations. Cybermagic has recently developed a module to integrate the Alfresco content management system with the Atlassian Crowd identity management system. Link
Blog
The future is elastic
This week I observe that the guys at Enomaly have developed an Amazon Machine Image so that Alfresco can run on the EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud. Eventually Enomoly are planning to provide Alfresco hosted appliances using Amazon web services as the backbone. The are also applying this same approach to providing Drupal, Typo3 and a few other solutions using an application service provider model.
This is just one of many example of utility computing taking off in the marketplace. Here's an interesting case study I came across showing the sort of savings a medium sized web company made by moving from a local datacentre to an AWS infrastructure..
Rapid application development with JPA
It seems to me that the Java Persistence API is now ready for primetime. Over the next few weeks I will attempt to develop a simple CRUD application using a JPA annotated domain model.Plan A - Initially I will attempt to use Grails to rapidly (hopefully!) develop a JPA domain model with a set of basic CRUD pages.Plan B - If that approach fails I will try and use Wicket with a hand-coded set of services and the GenericDAO pattern.
Embedding metadata in an image
I have been considering the question, "How can I provide a search engine with the metadata for my digital assets?". This question arose at the ECCHRD meeting recently. The context was with regard to adding human rights images, audio and video assets to Hurisearch. I came across rdfpic today. The rdfpic proposal (which looks dead in the water...) approaches the problem by using "content negotiation" filters in the http server. Crawlers are instructed to ask for photo.jpg with _application/rdf_ mimetype. The provided demo does not work but the principal seems sound.. Basically, we could provide a set of filters for popular web servers that look for embedded metadata in an asset and serve the metadata instead of the asset to search engines when requested. A second option would be for the search engine to download the asset and extract metadata from the XMP fields. And a third option would be for the metadata to be specified as photo.xml and contain an rdf:subject property pointing to photo.jpg. Some mechanism would be required to ensure that a search engine could find photo.xml. Of course, all three options are long range aspirations at the moment.. The proliferation of content management systems may eventually mean that by suitably tagging our assets with embedded metadata now we can hope that a future approach to asset metadata publication will be easier to add on without recataloguing our assets.
"Knowledge itself is power"
– Francis Bacon
Hi, I'm Damon,
a freelance web application developer. I build bespoke websites, web applications and plugins for knowledge and content management solutions. I primarily work with java solutions; Confluence, Jira and Crowd from Atlassian, Orbeon Forms and Alfresco.
