I’ve spent the day doing some work with our Alfresco integration to make it easier to install and a bit more maintainable. Fortunately the Alfresco team were kind enough to point me at their Module Management Tool which while being a bit rough around the edges is really quite cool. Basically, it takes the alfresco.war and a zip file containing the module you want to install and shoves the module into the war file, ready to be deployed. What’s particularly cool is that it actually has version management so it knows if it’s previously installed a module or if the installed module is more recent than the one you’re installing etc.

There is one trap for the uninitiated though, if you get a NullPointerException when you run it (at line 241), make sure your module’s zip file has the extension .amp. Took me quite a while to sort that out and Tomcat’s caching drove me nuts, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with how easy it was.