Just joined Order of The Bee...

It's 29-February today...It's a date which comes once in a 4 year...It's really a special day. Isn't it?...
On this special day, I would like to share that I have just joined Order of The Bee few days back and I am now a member of the Order of The Bee

Order of The Bee is an independent group of Alfresco professionals/experts/enthusiasts from the Alfresco community all across the globe, with the primary focus to promote Alfresco Community Edition and also aggregate the best from the community in order to help other community members, especially the developers working on Alfresco technologies.

Order of The Bee has members who have always been instrumental to help the Alfresco community in one or the other way, may it be blogs or books or tutorials or add-ons or answers in the forums or answers in IRC and so on...All these contributions really help a lot to anyone working on Alfresco.

Glad to be a part of OOTB team!!!

5 Things you must know about Aikau...

You must have heard a lot about Aikau in the recent releases of Alfresco and you must be interested to get familiar with it so as you can easily develop new customizations to Alfresco Share. Here I am trying to share my understanding about Aikau in a simpler way to make you familiarize with it in order to get you started with Aikau. Hope you will find it useful.

1. What is Aikau?
• It’s a UI framework developed by Alfresco.
• It’s going to be the future of Alfresco Share. Going forward it may replace the traditional way of developing customizations to Alfresco Share.
2. Why Aikau?
• Alfresco Share is a very good front-end to the Alfresco repository. Adding customizations to it, is sometimes a necessity while working on your business requirements. The earlier way of customizing Alfresco share is a bit challenging and also requires a good amount of time and knowledge to create customization.
• With Introduction to Aikau, an effort has been made to simplify adding the new customizations (adding pages or components) or making changes to the Alfresco Share tier in a much easier way.
• Another important aspect that can be easily achieved with Aikau is Code reusability. You can create individual widgets and reference them wherever required anytime. You will come to know about widget in the next section.
• It also improves the page load performance by loading only the required dependent resources for the widgets referenced on the pages.
• It also makes it easy to modularize your customization efforts by just focusing onto the specific widget customizations instead of the entire page/component.
• Once you are familiar with the development using Aikau, you will get to know that it is much faster to add new customizations to Alfresco Share in comparison to the traditional way.
3. How Aikau works?
• Aikau can be basically defined as a methodology to create new Surf pages or Surf components to Alfresco Share which are comprised of individual atomic widgets.
• Widgets are basically referenced in JSON model which can be defined in the JavaScript controller of a presentation web script.
• Widget is an individual component which basically refers its own CSS, HTML and i18N resources. In order to simplify the understanding, widget can be termed as an AMD module in DOJO terminology.
• Whenever a widget is referenced on a Surf page or component, Surf framework will take care of loading all the relevant resources for the widget in the browser.
• Aikau mainly uses DOJO implementation and it is powered by Surf framework. It heavily uses DOJO for AMD loader and widget templating. However, non-AMD dependencies can be referenced by widgets and other JavaScript frameworks may possibly also be used in the Aikau widgets.
4. Where Aikau is used?
• Aikau was initially introduced in Alfresco 4.2. Later on, it’s usage was expanded further in Alfresco 5 and its development is still inprogress.
• In Alfresco 4.2, Share header was implemented using Aikau implementation.
• In Alfresco 5, Aikau implementation has been provided for the following.
• Live Search
• Filtered Search Page
• Search Management Page
• Site Management Page
• Analytics and Reporting Widgets
• Page Creator
• Document List prototype
5. How can I get started with Aikau development?
• I found the following tutorial a very good starting point to learn about Aikau. It is simply perfect in order to get started and try your hands on Aikau development. You should be able to gain very good knowledge and information from this tutorial. http://ohej.dk/2014/07/tutorial-about-the-aikau-framework-in-alfresco-share/
• You can also refer to Alfresco wiki page - https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Aikau_framework which points to some very good resources in order to get good amount of knowledge about Aikau. I would surely recommended to go through them to get better understanding on Aikau. 
• There is also a very good online resource - Aikau Sandpit - provided by Alfresco where you can experiment with widgets live to get better understanding. Aikau Sandpit is available at - https://aikau-sandpit.alfresco.com/aikau-sandpit/page/na/ws/home. It is a must to try and is very useful.

Here is a small presentation about Aikau for your reference.

Must to know things for Aikau from Ramesh Chauhan