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Start “gedit” – shit the bed. You die. You die now!

Some sort of disclaimer

The new Beta2 release of Pojonode is available from the downloads section and includes the following updates:

• Added support for aspects using the @Aspect annotation. Checkout the demo for some cool examples.
• Clear distinction between folders and content nodes using two separate base classes: ContentNode and FolderNode
• Several other bugfixes

Most of the times when you customize Alfresco you end up implementing a lot of custom services and API’s on top of the core/repository layer provided by the platform.

As in most common designs, you usually separate these services in a dedicated layer that aggregates and uses core components like NodeService, ContentService, etc. However, since the dawn of time, Alfresco supported only a “generic” approach for content manipulation, mostly achieved through calls to get/setProperty() on an injected NodeService bean:

    String name = (String) nodeService.getProperty(nodeRef, ContentModel.PROP_NAME);

Pojonode is a library designed to move away from this non-OOP programming model and provide a POJO-based alternative for it. The same way that JPA and other ORM technologies enable the mapping between a pojo-based model and a relational database, Pojonode enables the mapping betwee an object-oriented model and an Alfresco content model definition. Pojonode’s techniques are somehow similar with the classic ORM approaches, but with some important extensions/adaptations to Alfresco’s core concepts.

You can read more about the framework on the Google Code project page which is a good starting point for understanding Pojonode’s main concepts and purpose.

While there are certain features still in work (like wrapping ContentService calls), most of the core Alfresco content management concepts (like managing properties and associations) are currently implemented and working.

Other features that might come in handy are the generation of content model XML and web client configuration. When enabled, they can handle the complete setup of the Alfresco content model for you. Check the Integration section of the wiki for details.