Alfresco Adds Major Extensibility Features To Its Open Source, Process-Led, Low Code Application Development Framework

Extension to framework will allow development of future proofed, custom apps

Alfresco, a leading open source provider of process automation, content management, and information governance software, has announced the availability of the latest release of its ADF 3.0 (Application Development Framework) during its annual developer conference, DevCon 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

John Newton, Alfresco Chief Technology Officer and Founder, noted: “We are focused on helping our customers create, access, and exchange business-critical information in the most agile and secure ways possible. To this end, we added some major extensibility features to our Alfresco ADF to simplify the path to building modern, content-rich web apps rapidly and securely. The foundation of a digital business is the data it uses and the content it exploits across a network of applications and platforms.”

The Alfresco ADF enables developers to rapidly build custom web apps that deliver outstanding user experiences and personalized customer journeys using the Alfresco Digital Business Platform. It provides a rich set of reusable Angular-based UI (user interface) components and services, command-line tooling, and client APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that surface Alfresco process, content and governance services.

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According to Forrester¹, “a focus on customer journeys requires much greater attention to user experience and application design to ensure users stay engaged and the business realizes benefits. Why? The higher level of automation for customer journeys and experiences will lead to many more employees using process applications.”

John Newton continued: “We believe a digital business needs more than a content repository, it needs a Digital Business Platform that developers can extend and customize to meet the needs of their enterprise. Alfresco provides such a platform that people can easily collaborate on content most relevant to them as well as move between the apps they use with ease to complete their work. Enterprises today need a single source of truth for information across their end-user apps and back-end systems. That’s the power of process-led, cloud-native content management – a single platform to manage, secure, and collaborate on content.”

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ADF 3.0 extends Alfresco’s content market leadership with significant performance enhancements designed to increase user satisfaction and adoption, serve up deeper insights securely, and connect content, processes and people more rapidly. ADF 3.0 new functionality includes:

• Significant Extensibility
  Developers will now be able to extend the main ADF components with their own code. This new extensibility mechanism makes it easier to maintain code customizations while remaining up-to-date with the latest ADF versions. By including this new extension framework, developers can isolate their custom work and easily upgrade (“future proof”) to later versions of ADF without losing their original code. Taking advantage of this new extensibility mechanism, Alfresco partners, such as Zia, Wipro, Geolang and Snowbound, have extended ADF by adding additional components leveraging AI (Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning, Blockchain and Digital Signature to deliver customer-centered digital transformation.

• App Performance With Javascript API in Typescript
  Alfresco has rewritten the Javascript API in Typescript so that packaging of App Source Codes is optimized for better performances. Typescript, designed for large app development, is also supported by Angular and uses it as its primary language. This ensures significant performance improvements of ADF apps when deployed in production.

• Support for Activiti 7.0
  Alfresco’s ADF 3.0 now supports the newest version of the cloud-native, open source BPM project, Activiti 7.0. Developers can leverage ADF to rapidly build process-led, custom web applications using Activiti. With a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture plus a modern user interface developer kit within ADF, the Activiti community is armed with a powerful toolkit in the world of digital process automation

• Support for Angular 7.0
  With the support for Angular 7.0, developers will gain immediate access to the performance improvements and several major improvements and new design features comprising Virtual Scrolling, Drag and Drop, and many others.

Newton added: “Creating apps that delight the customer in the user’s digital journey requires designing an experience that generates positive emotions at multiple points along that journey. There are a few ways to do this, but the most important one is to provide a meaningful experience that intuitively connects with the customer by developing ‘fit-for-purpose’, relevant apps that create higher engagement and positive customer behavior. With the customer at the center of any digital transformation, developers can use the Alfresco ADF to rapidly build ‘delight-driven’ functional apps that positively influence customer behavior.”

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DevCon 2019

DevCon 2019 is the forum where Alfresco’s growing community of developers, partners, and users from around the world come together to connect, network, collaborate and learn. This year’s event focuses on major new capabilities for the Alfresco Digital Business Platform.

As part of the more than 60 scheduled technical sessions, ADF 3.0 will be explored in both technical and product roadmap presentations, illustrating the benefits of migrating to the latest editions of the Alfresco Digital Business Platform. Presentations will include “Extensibility for ADF Applications” by Alfresco Applications Platform Developer Denys Vuika and “Let’s Play with ADF 3.0,” an exploration of the extensibility features in the new Alfresco Digital Workspace (ADW), presented by Alfresco’s Eugenio Romano, an architect and full stack developer.

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