From: Will Drewry <drewry@...>
Date: 2004-08-31T14:15:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's Killer App - every language has one

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 02:26:27 +0900, Sascha Ebach <se@hexatex.de> wrote:
> Hello Javier,
> 
> thanks for your interest. I am working on the CMS as time permits and
> Rails lets me develop it very fast. I am trying to get my development
> time funded by clients, because than i could really do full time
> development on it. I know if that can happen by the end of September.
> We'll see...
> 
> Javier Leija wrote:
> > I like the idea. I spent most of last week searching for a good CMS
> > and I was disapointed that all the good ones like mambo, wordpress and
> > tikiwiki are developed in PHP. Over the weekend I had to learn a
> > little bit of PHP, enough to develop my own wiki component for mambo
> > (a mambot as they call their plugins). But you know what? I din't like
> > PHP. It does the job and it is simple enough if you know C++ but it
> > just doesn't feel anything like Ruby. However I was very impressed by
> > the architecture in mambo (www.mamboserver.com). Those guys did a
> > great job with mambo. It is very very easy to install, to add plugins
> > or new components, to develop extensions, etc. and, it looks great. I
> > just wish that they had implemented it in Ruby.
> 
> Yes, mambo is a nice piece of software (feature wise). It has been
> around pretty long. I am looking at other packages for inspiration, too.
> 
> - ezPublish
> - drupal
> - mambo
> - Plone
> - and others
> 
> By inspiration I mean looking at features that are useful and make
> working with the cms a pleasure. Featurewise I would like to have the
> following:
> 
> - Versioning
> - Workflows
> - Tree based contentobjects and navigation (s. ezPublish or drupal) and
> automatic sitemaps
> - multiple websites per installation
> - shop functionality
> - multiple uses, i.e. every installation should be configurable to be a
> mixture of a blog/wiki/shop/news-site/portal/... (install ezPublish to
> see what i mean)
> - WYSIWYG editor for textareas (Kupu) and/or full page editing via
> bitflux editor (mozilla only)
> - modular (of course) plugins etc.
> - really great UI, probably making use of XMLHttpRequest (like Gmail) s.
> http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=191776
> - and, show that you can do all this with 1/5 of the code u would need
> with Java ;)
> - make it Open Source
> 
> among other things. I only have the tree based navigation figured out
> yet (and a very early UI), but I have only started. If I can get funded
> I plan to implement much of this functionality _this_ year. I have a
> good feeling about this, but don't hold me to it ;)
> 
> > I think Ruby with a clean CMS architecture like the one in mambo could
> > really make a difference for users and developers.
> 
> It always leaves me completely baffled that there is not _one_ such
> package for Ruby. But I don't exactly know what you mean by
> architecture. I think you mean the way you can work with the product
> (workflow)
> 
> > I'd like to know how your efforts are going and maybe even help you
> > with some of the implementation. So please keep me posted.
> 
> Thanks for the offer. I am looking into rails right now and so far it
> proofed to be really useful for what I plan. When I (really) got the
> hang of it I will probably put up a project website. We'll see how it
> goes from there. But I want to have a little head start to define
> architecture and make the CMS fairly usable before posting the first
> version. I will surely announce it here if all goes well.
> 
> The next 2 weeks are client projects ...
> 
> Cheers
> --
> Sascha Ebach
> 
> 


Just to throw in my two cents - it's probably worthwhile to check out
Apache Cocoon and Apache Lenya for inspiration as well.  The framework
is very, very cool, and I would love to see that style of XML pipeline
implemented in Ruby. I hacked on Lenya (with Mozile) at my last job,
and I enjoyed it quite a bit. (If only it'd been in ruby!) I did,
however, spend a considerable amount of time removing all of the XSLT
and replacing it with DOM transformations...

cheers,
wad