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Alfresco on Android

chiccodoro

Hi all

Has any of you ever tried to install Alfresco on your Android phone? Since Alfresco claims to be down-scalable, platform independent and runnable in-process, I think it should be possible to create an Alfresco-based app and run it on Android.

Please let me know if you:

Made any experience (good or bad) in doing so
Would advise against doing so
Want to tell me that this is the wrong forum (although I didn't find a better suited one)

Thanks and cheers,
chiccodoro

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Comments

mikeh

Why on Earth would you want to try and run the full Alfresco Repository on a phone?

It would make a lot of sense to have a *client* running on an Android phone, similar to the FreshDocs app that Zia Consulting have developed: http://www.ziaconsulting.com/home/mobilefreshdocs/freshdocs/

Thanks,
Mike

chiccodoro

I understand your question. The clue of this would be to be able to work offline and have all the necessary data stored on the phone. When you're online you could then synchronize the data from the phone with the one on the server (as far as I understand, Alfresco already supports synchronization between two "servers"; the fact that one of the "servers" is actually more of a client shouldn't then matter too much, does it?)

mikeh

I think there are better ways of solving offline content. Certainly iOS devices have support for local storage; a synchronisation task could then update as required without needing the full Repository. In fact, I believe Zia are already considering this for the next version.

I suspect Android has similar functionality; either via sandboxed filesystem access and/or via SQLite.

Thanks,
Mike

chiccodoro

I would like to be able to use the same object model on the mobile device as on the server. E.g. if I add an aspect, or a new subtype of a certain node type, these things should be supported on the mobile device as well. To access the model I'd need the corresponding services from Alfresco, too.

If my mobile app uses the services on the web server to access the data on the server, then I guess the synchronization of iOS or Android won't be transparent: I'll need to implement another Data Access Layer and Data Model for use on the mobile device, won't I?

Since the "Professional Alfresco" book says that Alfresco is very modular, lightweight, and down-scalable, I thought I might use some basic services to create and access nodes, to save these nodes offline and to synchronize them with the server. Id wouldn't have to be the whole of the Alfresco ECM "stack".

Let's look at the Knowledge Base example (from the Professional Alfresco book): Say I want to create a "Knowledge Base" app for Android. When online, I should be able to search for and read all knowledge base articles. When offline, I should still be able to find and read the ones I already accessed. Further I might want to create a new article on the phone, associate with other articles and save it in a folder. When online, these should be sent to the server.

To take it a step further, let's say we add a rating feature by means of an aspect for the score, and implement a JavaScript API to rate and view the ratings. Wouldn't it be great to be able to use this very JavaScript API as a means to implement the new feature in the mobile app, too?

mrogers

The first challenge for your requirement is that Alfresco needs a "proper" RDBMS. That may be overkill for your single user Android phone.
I'ts probably going to be far more efficient to provide a separate dedicated off line client that syncs with the sever when its available.

There were a couple of people on these forums describing how to run Alfresco off a USB flash drive, so you can do it

chiccodoro

As an RDBMS one could think of HSQLDB which is written in Java and "offers a small, fast multithreaded and transactional database engine which offers in-memory and disk-based tables and supports embedded and server modes."

I guess you guys are right and I might be crazy, but I still don't completely get the point what makes my approach fail.

chiccodoro

… but I still don't completely get the point what makes my approach fail.

…I've just downloaded the Alfresco Community Content Server package, which has a size of 113 MB, and am beginning to understand :-)… The book was talking about "lightweight" and "downscalable", so I was expecting a slightly different size.

chrishtucker

Hey, Alfresco is the new app recently launched on Google Play Store because of that it might be takes long time to become a famous. I also will try to download this app on mine Android and use it. Thanks for giving good information about alfresco Android app.