If you have any comments, questions, or general-purpose harassment you would like give us about this book, then please use the comment form at the bottom of each page! We promise that we will try to incorporate any feedback you give (minus the profanity, of course), will respond to your questions, and credit you appropriately.

Through the lessons in this book, we (or more specifically you) will develop the notion of an Upcoming Event. An upcoming event is something that occurs at a definite moment in time, like Tuesday at 7:30pm, has a definite purpose such as political meeting or a concert. These typically have what we term a presenter, such as the band performing at the concert or the political organization hosting the meeting. When we say presenter we do not mean a single person who is the leader of the meeting, such as Kurt Cobain (correct presenter: Nirvana) or Barack Obama (the Democratic Party), unless that is the sole person who is "presenting" the event, such as book reading by a sole author. Over the course of the lessons, the notion of what the "content is" for an Upcoming Event will change as you learn more about ECM systems. For now, you can think of a scanned invitation or ticket as the content that is to be "managed" for an Upcoming Event.

We have chosen Upcoming Events as the organizing, pedagogical tool of this book because they are broadly useful in many domains and complex enough that we can use them to facilitate explanation of a number of ECM concepts. When you have completed all the lessons in this book, you will have built a number of different tools that can create, edit, modify, and delete Upcoming Events in the context of an Enterprise Content Management system. You will have extended the notion of an Upcoming Event in a number of ways, for example associating multiple documents with single upcoming event, and allowed access sets of upcoming events in both a traditional ECM setting and in a custom presentation.

Please try to bear with us in the first few lessons, despite their lack of discussion of upcoming events, as these are necessary preparations for your journey on the road ahead.

Development environments are a personal preference and one that most software developers take seriously. The debates about the merits of various development environments-even within a community such as Java-are both frequent and heated. Given that a development environment is the primary tool that any software developer uses to do his or her work, the passions around these tools is understandable. However, book authors-and to some extent system builders-are forced to make choices in order to simplify the problems that they must solve. Writing a book such as this-or developing a tool the size of the Nuxeo platform-is difficult enough without compounding the problem of considering every possible development environment and configuration of said environment. For this reason, this book assumes the following about the tools that you are using to develop applications built on the Nuxeo platform:

If the setup above is not the one you prefer, it is probably best to work through the lessons of this book using the tools described here and after you are comfortable with the concepts adapt these examples to your tool set. There are two reasons for this: First, and foremost, it allows you to make faster progress on the "greased path" than if you are forced to spend significant time to "adapt" each example to the tools of your choice as you go. Second, Nuxeo has a number of different layers to it and during earlier parts of the book, many things are elided for reasons of easy exposition. If you try to port an earlier lesson to your tools before you have finished all the lessons, you may be unaware of important issues that were ignored for clarity-making the porting all the more difficult.

If you are using a Microsoft-based operating system, you will not have a "unixish" shell installed on your machine by default. We recommend using Cygwin, which is available from http://cygwin.org. Many of the examples in this book were developed with Cygwin.

The Nuxeo platform itself, many software subsystems it depends on, and the development tools used as you work through these lessons are all open source software. There is a tradition within the open source community of frequent updates to fix problems and distribution via the Internet, inevitably leading to distress among book writers as the readers are likely to be using at least somewhat different software than was used to write the book. To mitigate this problem somewhat, this book follows the classical strategy of trying to keep a stable "base" of expectations about the tools readers will use to work through the examples. For this book's lessons, you should use:

For the command shell, referred to above, almost any unix-like shell should work adequately; the authors use bash, version 3+ if you are concerned with being exactly compatible.

We will assume in this book that all of the files related to these lessons are kept in the directory /nuxeo. Further, we will assume that you have installed the tools described above in /nuxeo/tools if they did not come already installed on your system. In this book, our convention is to use this font for file names or file-system paths, this font for commands you type and text like this for

output you should see

Let's begin by making sure that the base for all the software will use, Sun Microsystem's Java Development Kit, is installed properly. You should be able to do a command like this:

iansmith@Photo /nuxeo 
$ java -version 
java version "1.5.0_17" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_17-b04) 
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_17-b04, mixed mode, sharing) 

iansmith@Photo /nuxeo 
$ which jar 
/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Java/jdk1.5.0_17/bin/jar

You should continue by verifying that you have correctly installed maven. Maven must also be in your PATH environment variable so that it can be found from the shell, like this:

iansmith@Photo /nuxeo 
$ mvn --version 
Maven version: 2.0.9 
Java version: 1.5.0_17 
OS name: "windows xp" version: "5.1" arch: "x86" Family: "windows" 

Continue verifying that your command line tools are correct by checking subversion.

iansmith@Photo /nuxeo
$ svn --version

svn, version 1.5.5 (r34862)
   compiled Dec 23 2008, 10:46:29

... more information...