Comparison of Alfresco versus Jackrabbit CMS on Liferay

Question

I would like to know your thoughts on using these two CMS on Liferay. I know that jackrabbit is more a framework and reference implementation of JCR. I'm more interested in a situation where you have a Liferay portlet and you need a CMS repository other than the Lifeeray document library because you need more features.

What bothers me:

• The level of extraction of metadata from different document formats (I see that both use the Apache tika parser)

• Content transformation level - for example, working with not-so-reliable PDF files (OCR)

• How easily a developer can expand functionality (for example, implement various document processing actions)

It takes a long time to try both of them, I have to solve one and stick to it.

thanks

Answer 1

I have never done anything serious with Jackrabbit, but I have done quite a few projects with Alfresco.

As collaborative efforts continue between Alfresco and Liferay to ensure solid and sound integration, Alfresco should at least minimize the integration effort between the two applications and perhaps a good starting point for your project.

From a functional point of view, Alfresco includes the following:

• as you noted, Alfresco uses Tika to retrieve metadata. By default, several types of documents are supported, and adding your own metadata extractor is quite simple and well documented.

• Alfresco will use Tika for transformations when the Swift project (future version). Tools such as pdfbox and OpenOffice are currently behind content conversions that provide good reliability for the average case.

• offering extension points for storage is what Alfresco is good at: you can connect your code to events for specific types of content , configure rules on folders that are launched when creating / updating / deleting their internal content, etc.