Content Management Matters ™

There were no fireworks, no fanfare or screams of "It's Here!, come and get it!". Last week, Alfresco very quietly released the newest version of their enterprise content management system. We here at CMSWire thought that was strange for such a well-known popular ECM.

So we contacted the folks over there. They told us that in a few weeks, Alfresco will officially, formally launch the release of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 2.2. Then they allowed us to grace the presence of their Chief Marketing Officer, Ian Howells, who taught us a few things about the impetus behind the release.

We all know that SharePoint (MOSS) is being heavily used for basic document management and collaboration services. We also know that the software is often deployed in an environment where it must be integrated with other technologies like content management systems and portals -- why else would so many Enterprise CMS vendors cooking-up nifty connectors and building repository bridges?

The message is clear: Knowledge workers the world over are putting a lot of digital stuff into MOSS and if your tech can't talk MOSS, you're liable to be left out in the cold.

Content Here, an analyst and consulting firm that focuses on content management technologies has published a report entitled Open Source Web Content Management in Java.

The report provides detailed reviews of seven software solutions including Alfresco, Apache Lenya, Daisy CMS, Hippo CMS, Jahia, Magnolia, and OpenCms. In addition, the report discusses the web content management marketplace in general and how open source solutions fit into this market.

This report is great because it provides companies with a review of open source solutions similar to the reports provided by CMS Watch, Gartner and Forrester on proprietary content management solutions.

The most irksome thing about developing with most Web CMS systems is the rigidity associated with layouts. The modern system is characterized by ten minute import and deployment lifecycles, followed by 100 hours of tweaking stylesheets to get everything looking just-so.

The new version of Polopoly aims to hammer another nail into the traditional webmaster's coffin by offering more advanced, automated customization with the introduction of its new 'out-of-the-box layout management functionality'.

Python

How is Python, the object oriented scripting language known for imposing indentation on developers, the "Programming Language of the Year for 2007"?

Forrester has released a list of 10 reasons why Apple's iPhone is no friend to IT.

You can probably think of a few already: the prohibitive cost, the first-gen factor, and fidelity to AT&T.

In the world of Java servlet engines, there are but a few major players. Everybody is familiar with the 800 lb gorillas -- BEA’s WebLogic and IBM’s Websphere. Oracle has a commercial product in the Oracle Application Server, while the open source offerings Jakarta Tomcat and RedHat’s JBoss round out the major players in the space.

But hold the show, according to an InformationWeek article, use of the Tomcat engine outpaces that of it’s competition by a rather surprising margin. And according to BZ Research, 64.3% of the respondents participating in a Java survey from December 2006 are using the Tomcat engine, with Websphere in use at 36.9%, JBoss in use at 32%, WebLogic in use at 23.7% and the Oracle Application Server in use at 22.4% of the environments.

For years the war for the enterprise has raged between Microsoft and Java with the heaviest battles occurring since the inception of .Net. However, recent research indicated that .Net is now coming out on the winning team.

This news is from Info-Tech Research Group - an IT research and advisory firm. According to an article on InfoWorld, Info-Tech's research indicates that in a survey of over 1,850 organizations of all sizes and industries: .Net is the choice over Java most often.

The report indicates that 12 percent of the surveyed companies focus exclusively on .Net, while only 3 percent are exclusively Java. That's a big difference and should spark some lively debate in the Java community.

To throw the Java community a bone, Info-Tech compares Java to legacy code in that it will always be around just like the infamous Cobol. Not sure if that's a postive thing or not.

The report (which is not sponsored so it should be vendor neutral) is entitled It's Official: .Net Roasts Java's Beans and is available for a fee on the InfoTech site.

Refresh Software has just released an updated version of its proprietary component content management offering.

Woven together by DITA, XML and web publishing experts, SR2 7.1 utilizes an SOA-based J2EE content repository. It installs directly into the IT back-end and sports a simple interface for front-end users.

SR2 also:

• Automates the development of technical documentation
• Makes it easy to author content on a hosted interface, or via Microsoft Word
• Enables XML content publishing across the Web, or on intranets, internet, RSS and portals
• Deploys DITA-based content architecture for topic-related authoring and content repurposing
• Supports any programming language using Web services or SQL, including .NET and Java

The updated offering also supports data migration, hot deploy external triggers, back-end search, and -- for the aesthetes -- customized WYSIWYG buttons.

In an effort we've decided to dub the free code revolution (IBM joined recently), Sun Microsystems has announced it will be licensing a handful of the key components of Java ME and Java SE under the open source GPL (general public license).

Java ME and Java SE are its mobile and desktop platforms, respectively.

The company has also built an online repository for open source Java products, dubbed the Mobile and Embedded Community.

Struts...Tapestry...Seam, these are all fully featured, open source and very active Java Web app frameworks. And all were available to the Alfresco Enterprise CMS architects when they played deciders for their recent 2.1 release.

Why then did they choose to go "back to basics" with a Servlets+JSP approach which leverages the lesser known URI Templates specification when implementing their new Web Scripts functionality?

Our global CMS and content infrastructure amigos at Day Software have announced JSR 283, v2.0 of the Content Repository for Java Technology API, to the Java Community Process (JCP).

JSR 283 picks up where JSR 170 left off by enabling large enterprises to manage digital content on a global level.

It has been a long five years, but the Roller Weblogger blogging platform has finally graduated from the Apache Incubator and achieved top level status as an Apache project.

In case you haven't heard, JRuby is an all-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. And here at the Ruby-fest in San Jose Nick Sieger of the JRuby core team educates us on the current apple of his eye: JRuby: Ruby on the JVM. He starts by asking, "What can Java do for Ruby?"

While our host waxes poetic about dinosaurs, I'm going to take an opportunity to update you on all the good that's gone down this morning.

Sun Microsystems senior staff engineer Tor Norbye kicked us off this morning with Ruby Tooling: State of the Art. For those expecting the him to get dangerously gung-ho about Ruby's merits (Sun is, after all, getting quite intimate with jRuby), we (yeah, we) were mildly disappointed.