As described in Chapter 1, A Publishing Style Web CMS, Alfresco WCM is used for content production and content delivery. Alfresco supports two main models for content delivery—static and dynamic. With the dynamic delivery model, content is served from Alfresco; however, the rendering part will not be handled by it, but by some other application. This provides flexibility in deciding what content to display and how it will be displayed on a page. Basically, a web script will act as a communication channel to fetch the content, which is being stored in Alfresco. With the dynamic content delivery model, content will be published to an Alfresco Runtime (as shown in the following figure) with ASR deployment, thereby making the content available for dynamic queries by basically any web technology (J2EE, PHP, Python, .NET, Ajax, Flash, Cold Fusion, and so on). Here the web script is a remote API used to query and retrieve the content from Alfresco Runtime:

In this way, you can use Alfresco purely for web content management, which will be responsible for just producing the content, and then any application outside Alfresco will be responsible for the actual page composition. Hence, you will have the flexibility to separate content production and content rendering/presentation. This allows us to easily integrate Alfresco with any other application. Later in this chapter, we will see integration with Liferay and Drupal, which will give you an overview of how we can use Alfresco as a content production environment. Then we will use that content in any application outside Alfresco.