Cross-posted to the Share Extras Development Group today.
Share Extras will be moving to a new platform in the next few weeks. The new platform will be GitHub, with the version control obviously provided by Git instead of Subversion, which is used at present.
There are many reasons for moving to Git from Subversion. I’ve spent a while reviewing the project issue list this week and it’s clear to me that there are many enhancement requests which may not be appropriate to make in the main Extras code base, or are simply not achievable within the project due to people’s time constraints.
Git will enable the wider community to fork individual any add-on as they feel the need to. I hope this will lead to more contributions back to the main project and foster greater collaboration (and perhaps a bit of competition?) with others.
Specifically, there is also the need to improve on the localisation of add-ons in a consistent manner, and there are some great tools available for doing that based on Git.
Whilst I had originally intended to simply migrate to a new Git VCS within Google Code, the frequent downtime and increasingly poor feature set and user interface when compared to other providers has led me to conclude that it is not a viable platform for future development.
In contrast, GitHub supports the notion of projects within an overall organisation much better (I have already registered Share Extras as an organisation) and has some great options for improving our documentation using cool standards such as Markdown.
I propose to migrate the current trunk codeline (and perhaps the 1.0 branch should time allow) at the end of August. There are several things that committers need to do before then, in order to help make it a success, such as ensuring that they have a README.md file in all their projects (this will become the main source of documentation, rather than the wiki), and helping to close down any issues that remain open on Google Code (issues will not be migrated over).
As always, if you have any feedback, please let me know. Otherwise I will be in touch with the main committers separately in the coming week or so.
Monthly Archives: July 2012
Media Previews is dead, long live Media Viewers
A while ago I wrote about the newly-extensible Document Preview component in Alfresco Share and how you can use it to customize the out-of-the-box viewers and add your own custom implementations.
I mentioned at the end of that post that there were some new examples of custom viewers coming in Share Extras and I’m excited that we’re now ready to release them on the site.
Peter Löfgren had the great idea of using the pdf.js project to perform direct rendering of document content in the web browser using HTML5. I’d already started work on some simpler examples of custom viewers, and on refining the Flash audio/video players that Share Extras previously provided for Alfresco 3.3/3.4.
The result is what we’re calling the Media Viewers add-on. This bundles up a total of six viewer implementations designed to show different ways of implementing custom document views, both with and without Flash.
- PdfJs displays documents, presentations and any other file capable of being transformed to PDF in-line in the web browser using the excellent pdf.js viewer, which uses the power of HTML5 to remove Share’s Flash dependency for document viewing.
The viewer supports a number of features not directly supported by the Flash document previewer, such as a sidebar with thumbnail, outline and search views, bookmarking of individual pages of a document, and will remember the page number and zoom level of previous documents that you have viewed.
- FLVPlayer and MP3Player display compatible audio and video files respectively, within the web-browser using the open source FLV Player and MP3 Player media players by neolao. Based on the content’s MIME type, the updated component automatically chooses the appropriate previewer to use.
While similar to the Flash players provided by Share out-of-the-box, these implementations allow advanced customization of the player via configuration and if FFmpeg is installed, will fire up a transformation to allow viewing of non-H264/FLV video and non-MP3 audio. The user is informed when conversion is in progress and the screen automatically updates when the content can be viewed. - Embed uses an in-line iFrame to embed the content itself directly inside the web page. It is suitable for use with content types that can be viewed directly within the web browser such as plain text and PDF, with the Chrome or Acrobat plugins installed. Again, this can be used to avoid the use of the Flash previewer for some clients.
- Prettify allows formatted code, mark-up and other supported text formats to be displayed in directly in the document and uses the google-code-prettify project to provide an in-line browser-based view with syntax highlighting.
- WebODF is an EXPERIMENTAL viewer which uses the AGPL-licensed WebODF project to display ODF content directly in the web browser.
WebODF cannot be distributed with the add-in itself, so in order to use it you must also download the latest JAR file from the supporting share-webodf project and install it in the same way as the main media-viewers JAR file.
What’s most exciting is that we’re building on top of some great projects such as google-code-prettify, WebODF and pdf.js, that are evolving at a fast pace and changing the way that documents are viewed in a browser environment.
There is plenty more information including download links on the main Media Viewers project page on Share Extras. Please try it out, let us know what you think and help us to improve this collection.