Opinion

After a very long time of infrastructure development I have taken some time to get myself familiar again with web development and web frameworks. I did not keep my search contained to the Java domain but I kept coming back to Java because I like java and because Java provided me with everything I needed.

Well almost anything….

Most people interact with applications via graphical user interface. Graphical user interface (such as web interface) exposes the functionality of the application; it should be easy to use, nice to look at, personalized and customized to meet all the end-user needs. This is a very hard task as is and should not be made more complex by cumbersome web frameworks. The main problem in J2EE was that developers must face 100 percent of Java EE's complexity even if they only need 20 percent of the services.

A few weeks ago I received an email from a person called Giorgio who stumbled across one of the blog I posted about my thesis work and the uses of MantaRay in that kind of environment. We started talking about an idea he had to create a distributed file repository; in other words, a distributed CVS. A repository such as the one he proposed wouldn’t have to relay on a centralized server!

I have spent the last three years designing and developing distributed applications that had a lot of similarities with the one Giorgio proposed, and as a result I was able to point out some of the many potential obstacles and pitfalls one had to overcome before such an idea could become a reality.

I figured that for 16bytes.com I would do a new research on open source CMS. I used Drupal for my last site but was determined to keep an open mind.
After a quick search in Google I decided to install mambo / joomla. My first reaction was “WOW, these guys know how to do CMS”. The GUI was great and it looked like a feature-full CMS.

Well, I came to my senses after two days of tedious configuration, rigid and complex management and a few explorer crashes. Reading a few blogs made it all clear, Mambo / joomla have great marketing people but they are still wanting in many CMS aspects. And while Drupal has something to learn about marketing and professional UI (the default user-interface of Drupal should be as good as mambo / joomla and currently it is not), they certainly hit the spot when it comes to CMS.