[Gllug] OSS CMSs

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 01:10:05AM +0100, Richard Turner wrote:
> I thought I recognised your name when I was looking into that :) Any
> idea why RedHat pulled-out? I thought it was based on their CMS
> originally and it's not as if the project finished years ago...

The APLAWS+ project was all about taking the previous APLAWS codebase
and working to stabilize & mature the core system & featureset to provide
a solid & reliable platform for long-term deployment. Since we achieved
that goal, there isn't any immediate desire for another big round of 
development on the system. So since the APLAWS+ release just over a year ago
there has been a change in direction to a much more community focused model
of development, with a broader range of small companies also involved in
working on bug fixing / small feature enhancements & layered applications.
So, its not so much a case of Red Hat dropping APLAWS+, just that the 
project changed its focus & direction, so there is no longer a big need 
for our own large scale development work on it.

> APLAWS+ was the first CMS I tried installing to test and although the
> RPMs went on OK, and the DB seemed to be set-up fine, it wouldn't
> actually run. The only help anyone on the forums could offer was 'ensure
> you're using exactly the packages documented, no earlier, no later'. Is
> it worth the effort it'll take me to install it; hunting out all the old
> packages it needs?

This is sadly a fact of life with 'enterprise' java. I've found that
despite the fact that there is supposed to be a uniform API that guarentees
an app can run in any conforming servlet container, in reality things 
often break even between small version number changes. We've traditionally
had a fair bit of trouble with Tomcat in particular. So yes, I would 
recommend you try and stick as closely to the recommended servlet container
versions in particular. Oh, and my personal recommendation is to use Resin
rather than Tomcat, since its historically 'just worked' on many many more
occassions than Tomcat. IIRC we tested Resin 2.1.x series - there was
definitely something odd in Resin 3.x series causing setup problems.

As to whether its worth the effort - the answer rather depends on your 
intended scenario. If is more personal use / hacking, IMHO you'd be
better off with a CMS based on a scripting language perl/python/tcl since
its just that much more productive. If on the other hand you just need a
standard out-of-the-box CMS with good support for standards - particularly
those related to Government online services, then APLAWS+ is a very goood
fit, since we put alot of work into making the content types, navigation
structure & all that stuff follow the government information standards.

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
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|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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