What is Crafter Rivet?
Crafter Rivet provides a comprehensive Web experience management application and high-performance content delivery framework for creating, managing, and publishing content-rich Web and mobile applications, such as next-generation enterprise websites, mini/micro-sites, marketing campaign sites, e-learning and online learning sites, enterprise intranets, social community platforms, and more.
Is Crafter Rivet open source?
Yes. Crafter is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.0.
Does Crafter Rivet use any other open source project?
Yes. Crafter makes use of some of the leading projects in the open source community. To name a few:
- Spring
- EhCache
- Orbeon
Does Crafter Rivet integrate with Alfresco?
Yes. Crafter Studio is a major extension to Alfresco Share for content authoring, management, workflow, and publishing. Crafter Engine natively consumes content published from Crafter Studio, and provides both Java and ReST-based APIs for Web and mobile application development, integration, and customization.
Why would I use Crafter Rivet for my portal implementation?
Most portals, like those from Liferay and others, incorporate content management systems into the portal framework itself. In many cases, the embedded CMS within the portal is sufficient for an organization's needs. However, in other cases, an organization will want to use a separate content management system like Alfresco for managing content for the portal. In these cases, Crafter enables a straightforward integration between Alfresco and the portal.
I have an existing Web application that I want to integrate with Alfresco. Can Crafter Rivet help?
Absolutely. Aside from building new websites/applications, this is one of the most important use cases that we've helped our customers with by using it. Crafter Engine provides you APIs (both in-process Java and ReSTful APIs) for accessing its services, which include accessing processed content that has been published from Alfresco.
If you have an existing Web application (e.g., website, portal, etc.) and you would like to start using Alfresco to manage its content, there is no faster way to get it done than with Crafter. There are three approaches for leveraging Crafter Engine (and Alfresco authored content) through your existing infrastructure.
Browser Application Approach
It is possible to leverage Alfresco content by consuming Crafter Engine's RESTful Service APIs directly from the Browser. This light-weight approach requires no changes to your existing infrastructure. All business logic and presentation production is performed by the browser itself via Javascript (AJAX and DHTML) or Flex and Flash based (RIA) applications.
External Server-Side Approach
It is possible to leverage Alfresco content in your delivery tier by way of Crafter Engine's RESTful Service APIs. This approach is agnostic to the construction of your delivery platform and is similar to the "Browser Application Approach" mentioned above except that instead of the user communicating directly with Crafter Engine via their browser they continue to work with your existing framework, which in turn leverages Crafter Engine's RESTful APIs. This approach requires only that your existing framework be able to issue HTTP requests, a capability of most all frameworks available today.
In-Process Approach
It's possible to run several existing application frameworks (including PHP, Python and Ruby based frameworks) "on top of" Crafter Engine. Crafter supports this configuration through support for Java based implementations of several mainstream scripting languages. The in-process configuration provides native integration between the Crafter Engine services and the desired language and framework.