[aplaws - Developing on APLAWS+] Raising the profile of APLAWS

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By: terry_permeance

I did a search for "cms" in sourceforge and APLAWS isn't returned as a match.
Makes me wonder if anyone is interested in raising the profile of APLAWS? Obviously
not having a release on sourceforge since 2005 doesn't help nor the fact that
sourceforge isn't linked to svn on fedora. Any thoughts on the future of APLAWS
compared to others such as Alfresco etc.

Terry




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By: shawnlane

I think the problem for APLAWS is it has been abandoned by Redhat. The original
architecture suited Redhat, designed to make money from services support. It
was never designed from the ground up as an open source solution, first it only
had Oracle support for example and Resin as the application server, plus
a proprietary build system and RPM deployments . By removing the need for Resin,
Oracle, Perl and building like a normal JEE application then this is a good
move. However I think it is too late. The outside world things are moving on,
specifications for content repositories that APLAWS does not have for example.
I know a number of local authorities are looking at WCM from another perspective,
they need a product that can deliver their services and is supported more easily
that APLAWS but has a minimum 5 year product life cycle. I think APLAWS does
work and is good for content management, but it does not meet what end users
are expecting in 2009.

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By: pboy

Hi,

|  It was never designed from the ground up as an open source solution,

I think it had been a Open Source project right from the begining when developed
on MIT and Arsdigita Community System.

But you are right, the APLAWS specific runtime system may have been a perfect
solution in the short run, but obstructive in the long run.

|  The outside world things are moving on, specifications for
|  content repositories that APLAWS does not have for example.

Compared to other Open Source CMS APLAWS has a lot of advantages and of features,
others dont have.

|  specifications for content repositories that APLAWS
|  does not have for example

There are only very few programs which follow that route (Alfresco for example).
Most use a specific database backend or file system.

End for the end user ir doesn't matter if the backend follows a repository framework.
It's more a developer's concern.

But again, you are right. We had better earlier taken up some of the ideas of
the discussion on the last user meeting at Camden.

But I think APLAWS / CCM has a lot of good and productive features and we are
on the way to eliminate the bad side of the beast.   :-)

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By: pboy

Terry,

for shure, on the "marketing" side of APLAWS there is a lot of room for improvement
-:)

Since some time I have administrative privileges on sourceforge and I will update
as much information as possible during the next weeks. Until now I was busy
with the URL resource: beast.

As soon as we have the next release ready, running in a standard JEE container,
we should do some "marketing" work, not only sourceforge, but freshmeat, cmsmatrix
and others. APLAWS / Byline had been present there for years, but sind the release
of 1.0.4 and the need to change a funded project to "user led" had made some
problems and delays. But looking over the commit log for the past months I think
the project is going well now.

Because of the "marketing needs" I'm very glad about your project of an "embedded"
database and the "examples" project (which make it easier to provide a demo
version). We should really try to discuss it and make plan for implementation.

|  Any thoughts on the future of APLAWS compared to others
|  such as Alfresco etc.

APLAWS / CCM has a lot of outstanding features (semantic approach, categorizing
system, among others, more technical ones) which set it apart from the crowd
of Open Source projects like Typo3 or Mambo/Joomla, etc.

Regarding Alfresco one idea was, to reimplement APLAWS's key conepts on top
of Alfresco to make use of their implementation of the Java Content Repository
framework. But Alfresco is not "really" an Open Source program but commercially
driven. And currently it is far away from a full fledged CMS.

So, if we decide to replace APLAWS persistence by JCR, we should use a really
free implementation like Apache's jackrabbit.

As a summary: In my perspective, the many outstanding features of APLAWS are
currently hidden and hampered by a bloated code base, performance and a lot
of minor usability issues, which sum up to a severe problem (steep learning
curve) for new users. For (to) a long time developers (Red Hat?) refused or
plumg forgot to clean up the code. Implementation of new features was the  main
and single goal. Discussions about that issue are 5 years old! "Never touch
a running system" was the motto. That strategie led to a situation, where new
Java functions were not used and some features of APLAWS are 2 or 3 times implemented
in a different way, because nobody understood the (bloated) code or it was to
time consuming to study it.

So, for the foreseeable future / the next months we should:

-  extensivly clean up the code which will result in performance gain and easier
maintenance and implementation of new functionality.

-  should polish up the user interface to make using APLAWS more pleasant.


Having done that we have a good chance to regain a terrain we may have lost
over the past year.


By the way, did you receive my mail (yesterday) via user.sourceforge?



Peter

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By: shawnlane

I think with the work you are doing, people looking for a JEE solution for content
management will be able to just download and run, something that was very difficult
with APLAWS without skilled developers. (NB many local authorities do not have
any developers).

To be constructive, I think areas that would make a difference is easy to set
up and deploy sub site, with easily modifiable templates, it sounds like Mandalay
solves the latter problem.

>So, if we decide to replace APLAWS persistence by JCR, we should use a really
free implementation like Apache's jackrabbit.
Agree, it's not clear what Alfresco are doing, except to try and undercut products
like Documentum and make money via support, training rather than straight licence
fee. As a WCM product Alfresco is a long way from being complete.

Performance is an issue which we fixed by buying a big expensive DB server and
by implementing a severe squid apache layer. So another area is to sort out
caching/performance, We have a lvs -> squid -> apache -> tomcat configuration
and it's difficult for publishers to know if their published page is actually
live!  On our Intranet we went back to simpler apache with modcache -> mod proxy
-> tomcat, which is fast and easier to deploy and a lot less painful than LVS
route.

PS I applaud you for the work you are doing on APLAWS!

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By: terry_permeance

A few random(ish) observations:

1. Aplaws was too hard to build before. It's now pretty simple with ecdc. Next
steps would be to migrate to maven and to embed derby.

2. I think we should replace the output applications with Liferay (or equivalent)
which does a much better job at layout, portlets, etc. By "output" I mean the
content, navigation and portal applications.

3. The content center needs to be rewritten in a more productive UI framework.
GWT might be a good option given Bebop is already Swing-like.

In short, Aplaws is pretty solid from a technical perspective, even if it doesn't
use Spring, Hibernate and the latest and greatest frameworks. I think the
RedHat/Arsdigita/Aplaws community have done a great job.

>From a non-technical perspective, Aplaws needs something to differentiate itself
from the open-source crowd
[http://java-source.net/open-source/content-managment-systems] and attract new
users and developers. It could be government compliance but it could be something
else. Alfresco + Liferay integration is pretty basic. Aplaws could position
itself as a portlet-based CMS.

Regards,
Terry



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By: shawnlane

1. Aplaws was too hard to build before. It's now pretty simple with ecdc. Next
steps would be to migrate to maven and to embed derby.
 
2. I think we should replace the output applications with Liferay (or equivalent)
which does a much better job at layout, portlets, etc. By "output" I mean the
content, navigation and portal applications.

Totally agree with point 1 and 2. Once it becomes easy to build and deploy you
will get more take up. Plus adding standards based portals would enable better
expansion of the system and more plug in opportunities. I think this would also
get SME's looking at it as an option.

Rebuilding the interface for editing would be a major task, but using GWT might
get more interest from developers.

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By: pboy

Hi Shawn,


thanks for the kind words.

|  Performance is an issue which we fixed by buying a big expensive
|  DB server and by implementing a severe squid apache layer. So another
|  area is to sort out caching/performance,
|  We have a lvs -> squid -> apache -> tomcat configuration and it's difficult
|  for publishers to know if their published page is actually live! On our Intranet
|  we went back to simpler apache with modcache -> mod proxy -> tomcat,
|  which is fast and easier to deploy and a lot less painful than LVS route.

It would be perfect if you could shortly describe on wiki  how you did setup
the Squid solution rsp. the modcache solution and what was the performance gain
about and what follow up problems araised (and how to manage them).

As part of the maintenance manuel I wrote some paragraphs about it, but way
too short.

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By: pboy

Terry,

I'm not familiar with Liferay, but I think, APLAWS should exist as an autonomous,
self-employed application and should not rely on / become dependent from a third
party product.

Indeed, portlet centric is a good perspective (and their is already a lot of
implementation in Aplaws).

APLAWS needs it's own portal server (therefore I'm interested in exploring
ccm-ldn-portal and bylines ccm-protalserver), should be able to integrate other
portlets and should be able to integrate itself into other portal solutions.
That's a long term perspective.

Regarding the presentation layer: The current "light weight" approach using
xsl is a promising perspective with a lot of benefits compared to plain JSF
or similiar frameworks. Our Mandalay development will make themeing much easier.


Peter



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