mercredi 2 mars 2005

I want the UdellCMS I'm only being slightly flippant. Over the last 1.5 years, Jon Udell has been espousing a set of ideas and following a pattern of trends that culminates in a very interesting screencast with the folks from Mark Logic. View the screencast and go to the 5min27sec mark (yeh, I should know the URL to go directly there, but I don't). There you'll see a CGI script that is an XQuery. Two weird ideas about this: it isn't a "programming language" (though it sure looks like one) and it runs as CGI. I had a chance to see a demo of this last week, and this CGI trawls through a huge pile of semi-structured content with instantaneous results. What's more interesting, IMO, is the effect this has on CMS design. It totally changes your approach to navigation. Instead of thinking very hard about folder structures or topic structures, you just throw everything into a big pile and let stored semi-structured and full-text queries create smaller piles. This allows numerous approaches to site navigation. Though this sounds non-revolutionary, it's the second effect that makes it worth thinking about. You don't have to think so hard up front about database schema. You don't have to declare, in software, content interfaces that describe your content types, then worry later about migration when you realize you were wrong. You just throw semi-structured content into a bucket, and let XML queries makes sense out of it. I first saw this with Syncato, another project that Jon covered. Kimbro Staken, in a Syncato FAQ, said "Syncato achieves its power by not restricting the structure of the content in the database too heavily." I think it is great for application servers to have formal components with well-defined interfaces. The internals and core services should always be stable. But the Rails folks are arguing that frameworks are best for the low-level machinery. From Loud Thinking: "One of the clear goals for Rails from the start was to stay at the infrastructure layer. I didn't want Rails to succumb to the lure of high-level components like login systems, forums, content management, and the likes." I'm left wondering if content in a CMS should be approached from the POV of application server machinery (model it, write an interface, create a component, register it with the system) or something higher-level and run-time oriented. 12:41:54 PM   comment []

Zest, gocept, and Enfold join ZEA ZEA has three new partners: Zest Software, gocept and Enfold. Zest Software (formerly Zopeworks) is a Zope solution provider in The Netherlands, offering a broad range of services. Zest was started by Jean-Paul Ladage, a familiar face at Zope events. gocept is well-known as a long-time Zope company in Germany and one of the major forces behind DZUG, the astonishingly successful Zope user group in Germany.  Christian Theune and Christian Zagrodnick have been deeply involved in Zope efforts in Europe for many years. Enfold Systems is focused on Windows server and client technology for Plone, and was started by Alan Runyan (co-creator of Plone, Plone Foundation board member and officer) and Andy McKay (ZopeZen and Plone book fame, plus long-time Zopista).  Enfold is based in the US. ZEA is very pleased to have these three high-reputation companies join the business partnership. 12:04:21 PM   comment []