Using the Javascript Console: Creating and populating datalists

This is the first post in a series of posts to showcase the abilities of the Alfresco Javascript Console. The Javascript Console is an Alfresco admin console extension to help developers and administrators to easily develop and execute Javascript against the Alfresco repository. For more information on the Javascript Console and how to install it, see the share-extras wiki page.

In this first installment I’d like to show how to create datalists and datalist items from Alfresco Repository Javascript which can be useful when you want to populate a site’s datalists automatically. Continue reading

Diving into java scripting frameworks

As I wrote sunday, I experimented with beanshell and it worked pretty well und faster than I anticipated. Nevertheless I heard about some other scripting frameworks (and their integration in java 1.6) which motivated me to investigate a bit more in this direction. Apparently Mozilla’s Rhino is a very powerful yet fast framework that provides javascript aka ECMAscript. Performance benchmarks by Pankaj Kumar in his article BeanShell, Rhino and Java — Performance Comparison show that my choice of beanshell as a scripting framework might not have been that best – performance wise. I’ll definately check out Rhino for use in my application.

Another interesting framework I came across when looking into scripting with java is the Apache Jakarta Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) which provides a framework to create JSP pages in different scripting languages. To achieve this it offers a uniform interface which wraps several scripting languages like javascript, python, tcl and many more.