Carlo Sciolla (@skuro) of Sourcesense was looking for a way to use Maven to create an Alfresco development environment. Not satisfied with the default Ant-based build supplied with the SDK, he wrote a quick tutorial for others interested in doing the same.
To start your Alfresco development experience, you need a development environment. Let's say you’re more into this Maven and you'd rather leverage its capabilities instead of using the default ant based build system provided along with the SDK. In this tutorial, I'll guide you through the process of setting up from scratch your development environment. And by saying "from scratch," I really mean it: We'll start from a fresh installed Linux box and the we will add piece over piece until we'll be see the Alfresco flower on our browser. This will be a *basic* tutorial, just to put in place the foundation for later improvements.
This post steps through the process of creating a suitable MySQL database for Alfresco, installing Maven, and then, finally creating a new project using a Maven archetype.
The other interesting thing about this post is that it shows you how easy it is to start distributing your software and archetypes if you use Sonatype Nexus Repository. Carlo was able to go from idea to implementation with Alfresco quickly, because Alfresco made artifacts and archetypes available with an instance of Sonatype Nexus Repository.
If you are a software company, the easiest way to distribute your software to end-users is via a Maven repository. If you use a repository manager like Sonatype Nexus Repository, and if you standardize using Maven archetypes, you decrease the barrier to entry for users interested in your technology.