Inside Documentum

Momentum 2008 – Centrestage

Of course the star of the show was Centrestage. If you don’t know what Centrestage is (where have you been?), in a single sentence, it’ s the next generation of Documentum client providing Web 2.0 features, a significantly different customisation model (compared with WDK) and no-cost/low-cost licencing model.

I won’t go into too much detail about the features except to say they include basic content services, personal spaces, team spaces, blogs, wikis, rss, tagging and faceted search. The time line was set as 1.0 to be released April 2009 (the beta version is available on the download site), 1.5 to be released after that and then a D7 version released by the end of 2009.

What did interest me was some of the details of the architecture and development environment. This is a web client that implements rich client functionality using Javascript. Centrestage uses a library ExtJS v2.2, that has powerful DHTML manipulation facilities. All the back-end logic is provided via DFS which is accessed via a technology called DWR v2.0. DFS provides a SOAP/WS-* interface which is difficult to call via Ajax. DWR (Direct Web Remoting) solves this problem – take a look at the wikipedia link, it’s a fascinating idea.

The UI is composed from numerous separate components which, in concept at least, are like Sharepoint WebParts. Since each component needs to be rendered on the page separately I wondered whether this would mean that a page with, say, 20 components would need 20 separate network calls to display the page. In a high-latency network environment this could be a performance nightmare. Apparently the DWR library allows for batching of requests – it means that having numerous components on the page could be displayed using a smaller number of network requests.