Which is easier to extend, Alfresco or Nuxeo?

Question

I am considering doing a rewrite of an open source project from LAMP to J2EE and integrating it with an enterprise oriented CMS as the GUI. The two most viable OSS ECM J2EE CMS platforms that I have run across are Alfresco and Nuxeo.

I need to get into some deep integration with whatever CMS I pick. Which one of these two technologies (or propose another that I don't know about) are easier to learn how to integrate with for the developer? From both a developer and an end-user perspective, which OSS ECM J2EE CMS do you prefer?

Answer 1

Hi,

First, I hope this answer is not comming too late. Missed it at first because I was not at work.

I've used both Alfresco (albeit version 2.0 community) and Nuxeo. I'd classify both more as document management systems (DMS) than CMS.

From the end user perspective, both are relatively the same, meaning that if you have to learn one and don't have to switch between them, the difference are not that important.

From the developer perspective, I think that Nuxeo is more interesting. The documentation is impressive, relatively clear. The team is responsive of inqueries and you have access to all the code source. The dual licensing model of Alfresco is less interesting and leave you wanting for more at times.

Also, in Nuxeo, the development model for new "features" is quite clear in Nuxeo, and highly reusable. In many situation, you only have to create (or reuse) an XML Schema, create minimal XML to link things together and you're done. Since the system is highly modular, you can easily plug in the behavior you need.

For me, Nuxeo is more of a platform, on top of which you can develop interesting features, that a document management system.

I'd suggest that you try the developer tutorial (http://www.nuxeo.org/static/dev-tutorial/) to see how it fits with you.

Don't hesitate to ask for precision, here or personnaly.

Regards.

Patrick

Answer 2

At the company where I work, we tried Alfresco, but we are not all to optimistic about it. It is overly complex and require a lots of time to learn. The documentation is not so great either.

On the other side, I have tried Nuxeo a bit, and we found it to be well documented, easy to start with, and easy to extend. Going throuhg the developer training mention by Glenn, you can easily become productive.

One more good thing about Nuxeo is that they try to follow standards. That means if you want to expose a webservice (Rest or SOAP), you can use JAX-WS and JAX-RS respectively.

Storage Also Nuxeo uses VCS as storage backend, which stores the data directly in the Database in separate tables for each schema. This means that you can view / modify data in the database easily.