Introduction

Alfresco, as you know, is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management system, distributed under GPL (GNU General Public License) license.

Note

To know more on GPL model, read on http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

The community version of Alfresco's source code is freely available to download and it allows you to configure your environment, change and build the code, include enhancements, and finally contribute back to the community so that the Alfresco source code gets bigger, richer, and more enduring.

The Alfresco community source code uses Subversion as the source code control system. You need to download the source code from the Alfresco subversion server. Then build and deploy in your own application server (Tomcat, JBoss, Geronimo, and so on).

In this chapter, we will explore how to set up the Alfresco development environment, configuring your system with all the dependencies installed, compiling and building Alfresco's source code and finally deploying the Alfresco...