Alfresco aka Bloatware

For some time I’ve been looking for a document management system (DMS) to add to my tool kit. I have come across good reports of Alfresco a few times and thought I would give it a go.

Now it’s not my intention here to hurt any persons feelings so don’t take this personally…but I just have to vent! I went to download the Alfresco package and found that it was ~500MB. Now that seems a little on the large side and it must be packing a bunch of embedded things like Tomcat and Mysql which I already have on any Debian system. So I thought I would just grab a copy of the source and compile it quickly…I cut the download off at 1.5GB! May as well have just run:

wget *.jar

Holy crap, they must have included every Java library ever written on planet Earth and a few from just outside the Solar System! Ever heard of dependancy management or Ivy caching? Makes my 60MB war file look like a toy (which I can assure you it’s not). At this point I don’t care any more how functional the app is, I’m not going to use it. How is a man to be Agile (let alone Lean) with tools that over weight?

MyDMS may not have super cow powers but so far is the best that I can find, the Grails Stitches plugin looks promising if I can update it to a newer version of Grails. KnowledgeTree looks interesting and I’m pretty sure that I can build a basic Grails DMS that holds the document in a relational database. But I still have the nagging feeling that an IT problem this old should have been solved already…