This document quickly describes a few SIDE-Labs features.

Quickly make "proof of concept" and prototypes

SIDE-Labs is a set of graphical tools which automatically generate an application on Alfresco platform, with a lot of features. Of course, this application doesn't contain, at first, any logic but you demonstrate this way you completely master the technologies you're going to use.

Design Alfresco Content Types

SIDE-Labs enables you to design data model combining content and highly structured data in an uniform way.

During execution, content and highly structured data are stored in the same repository allowing to search for information inside the two sets of data.

Design Alfresco Advanced Forms

If we can imagine to develop a few forms by hand, it is completely unrealistic to develop a few hundreds this way. SIDE-Labs enables you to design powerful forms for your Alfresco application, whatever the number of them. Through the mechanism of generation, you'll be able to produce the desired result by just regenerating when necessary.

Design Alfresco Workflows

SIDE-Labs enables you to design workflows for Alfresco. In contrast with JPDL designer from JBoss, not only is created the jPDL file, the content model and all the related artefacts corresponding to the workflow are generated and automatically configured for Alfresco.

Build Complex reports, with Joins, for Alfresco

What seems natural is in fact very difficult in Alfresco because of the impossibility to achieve joins, related to the Alfresco data model and the way meta data are stored. To stretch this limit, SIDE-Labs provides a replication mechanism which synchronizes Alfresco metadata in another database, structured according a real data model, not a content one.

So joins become possible again :-)