On Friday 30th January I ran a code camp on Surf for Alfresco partners and customers. Ben Hagan, Alfrescos WCM Pre Sales Consultant was in attendance to provide assistance, advice and help.

Surf is Alfresco’s new web application framework for building custom applications on top of Alfresco and indeed on top of anything else as well.

The event was well attended which exposed a lack of power points, but a few extension cables later and we were away.

The material was mostly provided by Alfresco and is being made available so you can go through it too. Jeff Potts has provided the slides and files you will need.

The morning focused on looking at Alfresco’s new Share application. Share is Alfresco’s collaboration user interface, it has been built using the Surf framework. We worked through some examples that showed how to develop a Share dashlet. This is a component that can be built to extend the functionality available to the user in Share.

In the afternoon we looked at Surf’s ability to build websites. This involved building a Surf website from scratch. Building the required XML files and seeing how the framework fits together

We then had a quick look at the Web Studio interface. Web Studio is another application built on top of Surf. It is used for building web sites and eliminates the need to work with raw XML files.

Hopefully the day was useful and some of the feedback on Share and Surf was very positive, I get the feeling that people don’t want to start building applications from scratch. This means the website templates that are developed will be key in the adoption of Web Studio.

Where ever I have demonstrated Share the response has always been very positive, mix that in with the relative ease with which it can be extended and customised and you have a killer application.

To learn all about Surf visit the Surf Platform Wiki.