Alfresco or Drupal?

By innopeak2000 on 20 Nov 2007 at 23:23 UTC

We have a heavy media based consumer oriented web site. Think of Disney or CNET etc... The underlying technology is Java based (jsp, servlets, hibernate, mysql / oracle). There would be a big team working on content generation and we need a CMS that can do a stellar job and scale well.

What would be the best CMS system to suit the above needs? Can Drupal work well for a totally Java based web application?

What do major sites like Disney, CNET etc., use for their CMS systems?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

Well since Drupal uses PHP

nevets commented 21 November 2007 at 00:18

PHP and java are language used on the backend/server side of the website. While one could use both on the same site it would make things more challanging. On the surface since you are java based Drupal would not seem to be an approriate choice.

Drupal on Java

paulhh commented 23 November 2007 at 10:53

We've just successfully integrated MediaWiki with Alfresco running in the same Java VM using the Quercus library. I believe people have also got Drupal running under this library on JVM too.

We're doing an update to the Alfresco PHP library that will allow the same PHP api to be used to either call Alfresco remotely (PHP running natively) or in-process (PHP running on Quercus interpreter).

Cheers
Paul.

Drupal on Java

idotzang commented 3 January 2009 at 07:41

Hi Paul,
I'm currently planning a new project, and your configuration is what came to my mind -
I am no CMS expert, but got the impression that Drupal is a good way to go, especially when I think of extensibility.
On the other hand I come from a strong Java background, and am looking to write the site's backend in Java.

My plan is to use Drupal/PHP as the frontend, and Java, probably using Spring MVC for controller, as the backend.

I was wondering if you have any impressions / go / no-gos as for Quercus ?
Did you find it working well ?
Were you able to create a robust architecture on top of it ?

Regards,
Ido

I can't speak for Drupal....

mjasay commented 22 November 2007 at 06:07

...but I can speak for Alfresco. A range of web properties (as big as those you mentioned) use Alfresco. Alfresco was recently the only open-source CMS highlighted by Forrester as a real challenge to the proprietary incumbents. It also won InfoWorld's open source CMS bake-off. If you need an enterprise class Java WCM system, Alfresco is your best bet, for open source CMS and increasingly even when (or especially when) compared to the proprietary incumbents.

Having said that, I'm a big fan of Drupal and there are plenty of high-volume sites that use Drupal. I'm definitely not saying any of the above as a slur on Drupal.

In fact, some have considered using Drupal and Alfresco together, which makes sense if you think of Alfresco as the heavy-duty back-end repository and platform and Drupal as the front-end web publishing tool. Alfresco has a PHP API that makes this feasible....

If you have any questions about Alfresco, just ping info@alfresco.com. I or someone else will answer you there.