The Maven Alfresco SDK™ - formerly Maven Alfresco Lifecycle 3.9.1 - provides a fully fledged Maven support for Alfresco ECM WAR and AMP project development. Being fully integrated with Maven it allows to both leverage the vast number of Maven plugins for your Alfresco project as well as integrated your project easily in Open Source and Enterprise development processes.
The Maven Alfresco SDK™ is fully documented in the single components websites (links above) as well as updated on the Alfresco Wiki.
The Alfresco Maven SDK introduces a new way of conceiving software development, deployment and release of Alfresco related projects and artifacts. In contrast to the manual (and error prone) deployment approach based on an installer / Alfresco WAR distribution(s) and the infamous $extensionRoot, the Maven SDK provides a unified access to fine grained Artifacts (jar,war,pom files),] that can be easily integrated in your project by the means of Alfresco-specific Maven components and configurations. The main goal of this SDK is to enable rapid development and prototyping of Alfresco projects, while enabling agile development practices (i.e. TDD, FDD) and fostering process reuse due to standardization
The Maven Alfresco SDK relies on a number of components:
No manual Alfresco download, application server or database is required. See details in the SDK pre-requisites page.
Maven Alfresco SDK™ 1.1.0 is compatible (for now) with Alfresco Community (4.2b+) and Enterprise (4.1.2+). The majority of the features might still work when using lower Alfresco versions, but certain artifacts might not be available in the Alfresco Artifacts Repository. You can probably fix this with some Maven configuration, but use at your own risk.