Open source enterprise content management (ECM) provider Alfresco Software is now offering Alfresco JLAN (once known as the Alfresco Intelligent File System) under the GNU Public License (GPL),

This news follows Alfresco’s adoption of GPL licensing for the rest of its open source enterprise content management software earlier this year.

Alfresco describes Alfresco JLAN as a unique implementation of an embedded virtual file system that offers the only Java client and server implementation of Microsoft Window’s CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol, allowing content, system administration information, and rows in a database to appear as a shared drive.

“The shared drive is the de-facto document management interface for the vast majority of computer users today,” says Alfresco.

Features and functionality included in Alfresco JLAN are:

• Only Pure Java client and server implementation — CIFS, NFS and FTP
• High Performance — Similar to the native file system
• Enterprise Authentication — NTLM, NTLMSSP, SPNEGO, Kerberos/AD
• Real-Time Access — No copy-to-local disk or conflict resolution issues
• Offline Access — Integration to Microsoft(R) briefcase

Among the customers of Alfresco JLAN customers are Sybase’s Avaki EII, Caringo, EMC Documentum and Symantec’s Veritas.

“Alfresco JLAN has allowed us to expand our OEM momentum with a simple interface and low cost open source solution, which can be embedded easily into various systems,” said John Newton, CTO, Alfresco Software.

“Today, more than 50 customers, including some of the largest software companies in the world, have already incorporated Alfresco JLAN into their products,” he added.

For those interested, Alfresco JLAN can be downloaded here.

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The latest version of GlassFish, the open source Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5 application server, arrived with clustering support and faster performance.

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I just got a brand new Mac Pro and I spent most of the day installing stuff, but the next day I was trying to get a little work done… I ran into a problem when trying to invoke web services on CF8 - it threw the following error:

coldfusion.jsp.JavaCompiler$UnknownCompiler: Unable to run the internal Java compiler: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/tools/StandardJavaFileManager.

I setup the following test code using Doug Hughes’ Fortune web service, to make sure it wasn’t just the service I was trying to call:

<cfset ws = CreateObject("webservice", "http://www.doughughes.net/WebServices/fortune/fortune.cfc?wsdl")>
<cfset f = ws.getTopicsList()>
<cfdump var="#f#">

After searching google, all I could find were a few other people with the same problem and no solution. I found that the StandardJavaFileManager class (the one it can’t find) is part of Java 6 - I was running Java 1.5, and I know that on Windows CF8 ships with Java 1.6. I pinged Sean Corfield to see if he had experienced these problems. He said, no but he is already running Java 6 (which helped me confirm that was indeed the problem). He also helped me figure out step 3.

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One of the handy new features in ColdFusion 8 is that CFC’s are now serializable.

There isn’t a whole lot of information about this new feature in the docs, but I did some playing around and it does appear that they have used Java’s serialization API. This means that you can use java’s java.io.ObjectOutputStream to serialize your CFC’s…
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During the opening day SpringOne keynote Interface21 explained how they plan on using the funding they recently secured. Later in the day, I spent a few minutes with Neelan Choksi, COO at Interface21.

Neelan explained that for Interface21, the use of an open source license (Apache License 2.0), an open development model and a free product with paid support business model is about one thing, developing software. Yes, Spring is open source software, but that was a pragmatic choice. A choice born out of the market landscape at the time, not from an ideological love of all things open source.

Keeping this in mind, it shouldn’t surprise you that Interface21 announced they’d use their funding to, amongst other things:
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