Speakers

John Newton

CTO & Chairman, Alfresco

John Newton, CTO and Chairman, has had one of the longest and most influential careers in content management. In 1990, John co-founded, designed and led the development of Documentum®, the leader in content management recently acquired by EMC®.

For the next ten years, he invented many of the concepts widely used in the industry today. In addition, he built Documentum's marketing and professional services organizations in Europe. John has also been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Benchmark Capital.

John was one of the founding engineers at Ingres® where he helped develop the world's first commercial relational database. John graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Presentations

Composing Content-rich Web Applications using REST-based Scripting

Rapid assembly of a Spring web application requires an easy-to-use web framework for developers and web designers that makes it very simple to compose content into the user experience. High-end web sites, such as travel and e-commerce sites, may use Spring to integrate enterprise and back-end systems into the site, but can be let down by limited web frameworks, a lack of content services and a mass of disconnected JSP pages.

This presentation explains and demonstrates the SURF framework as a
new web framework founded upon the concept of Scriptable REST.
Scriptable REST quickens the pace for deploying REST controllers and remote application interfaces. It enables a scripting approach to web application assembly – lowering the cost of application development while moving the design of the web site from a purely technical exercise to one that can be built and extended by a web design team.

The SURF web framework improves upon existing web frameworks (such as Tiles or SiteMesh) by offering an easier means for defining and reusing site elements such as pages, templates, layouts, components and chrome. SURF provides remote connectivity management as well as integration to open standards, such as the OASIS CMIS interoperability standard so as separate content management from the application development process.

Using the standard Spring Pet Clinic application as a starting point, this session shows how that application can be developed using SURF’s Scriptable REST architecture. It demonstrates how content is externally managed, deployed and integrated into the application by the end user. It also shows how the application can be extended using scripting that complements the Spring MVC framework.

Session Detail