OUTERTHOUGHT.BLOG

Outerthought goes Volvo

2008-11-19T10:55:43.000+01:00

Running a small business is a on-going battle between risk management, opportunism, long-term strategy and medium-long-term thinking. The joy of being small however, and having a short decision cycle, is to be able to act and re-act swiftly, and to make a point when it matters rather than when the media campaign dictates. We've made a small decision a few weeks ago we're quite proud about, and we want to share it with you.

That decision is to go Volvo for our entire car fleet. OK, it's a small fleet with six vehicles, however we feel the message behind this decision is important. The car industry is going through an extremely bad time at the moment, and needs any help it can get. Being a large industry, car manufactures do a lot of outsourcing and subcontracting, which means other companies will be impacted as well.

Volvo is one of the more important employers in the Ghent region, and should get credits for that. Local employment is very important in order to cut traffic and thus pollution, but it also builds a spirit of togetherness and entrepreneurship for the entire Ghent region. That's why we joined Gent BC right from its start: Ghent is a great region to work from, and we're proud to share that region with companies like Volvo.

The Volvo brand, in our minds, is a factor of quality, cost/value balance but also a level of environmental awareness we want to be tied to. Not so much the pure ecological values, but an awareness of a product existing, operating, evolving in a certain context. A sense of ungreediness, not abusing the available resources - very much like we try to grow the business context of our open source products: by finding customers that want to share our common ideals and goals, by growing common platforms where win-win solutions can be created.

Plus, they're great cars to drive as well, obviously. ;-)

So from now on, our car brand will be Volvo, preferable car models which are assembled in the Ghent manufacturing plant, and purchased by our leasing partner at a local Volvo dealership (ACG).

Disclosure: Volvo isn't on our customer list.

UnReSTful thoughts

2008-10-22T09:35:00.000+02:00

It seems as if ReST has reached some sort of tipping point: different schools of ReSTfulness are starting to appear, and its original creator has a challenging time defending what defines 'true' ReSTfulness. As architects of a ReST-centric web application development framework, it's the kind of tension which shows interesting times are ahead of us, and a call for caution to do the right thing.

I'm particularly struck by this blog post from (very) old acquaintance Dave Pawson, who I enjoyed meeting many years ago at an XSLT training course then organized by the Belgian SGML Users Group's president Paul Hermans. Talk about dinosaur memories. ;-) Here's what Dave writes on the ongoing debate between 'true' ReST designs and their more diluted forms:

Ten years ago I saw James Clark in action on DSSSL then XSLT. I gave him a nickname, BSOP, brain the size of a planet (Hitchhikers reference). James seems to operate on a level (and I'm told at a speed) quite different from mere mortals. Others whose opinions I value have confirmed this. No complaint from me, I'm grateful for what James has given freely to the world of software. The perspective though is that the James's of this world are few and far between. Never having met Roy, I've heard enough to believe that he's quite possibly in a similar category. His thinking seems far enough away from the people that are approaching REST for the first time that there is almost too big a gap. Roy has forgotten more than most are likely to learn about HTTP. When I want to use REST to get a message over that's the focus, not architectural issues. I think this is one of the reasons that REST is still misunderstood. Until such as Paul and a good few others do some really good job of 'translating' from architecture to ... whatever you want to call the practical layer of thinking that more common folk work at, then REST will be misunderstood, 'adapted for use' and otherwise abused due to misunderstanding.

I'm almost convinced that Roy can't | won't | is too busy to do such a translation. It's down to others to try.

Like it or not, this is one of the challenges ahead of us when trying to raise awareness (and sympathy) for Kauri. Rather than the technical details, which is all fairly mundane Java stuff anyways, what we should try to achieve with Kauri is to create some practical level of can-do-mentality with Java developers, while gently guiding them to do ReST the right way.

And not step into the trap of alienating ourselves from the user community on the basis of principles rather than usefulness. Kauri should bring usefulness to ReSTfulness.

Marc and I will be preaching ReST for Java folks on December 8th at Devoxx, so by then we should be ready with some real answers.

Interesting times ahead.

Outerthought joins Gent BC

2008-10-03T11:05:49.000+02:00

Yesterday, the first general assembly of Gent BC was held in the dean's offices of the Ghent University (UGent). Outerthought, together with SMO bvba, were the only SMEs to join this new initiative right from the start as an associate member, with Steven also joining the board of Gent BC.

Gent BC is a new initiative from the Ghent city administration, the University of Ghent, and the Provincial Development Agency and aims to become the prime online and real-life networking platform to stimulate technological entrepreneurship and innovation in the Ghent region. The goals of Gent BC are threefold: to combine and strengthen efforts of all actors in the Ghent knowledge economy, to stimulate academic, technological and innovative entrepreneurship, and to promote the Ghent knowledge region in Flandres and abroad.

Outerthought is the only SME currently joining the Gent BC board, and while our primary aim obviously is to connect with all involved parties, many of them being academic institutions and large organisations, we also want to represent the specific needs and priorities of innovative and technology-driven SMEs.

It is often said that SMEs have difficulties collaborating with academic research institutions or exploiting governmental support to grow their business and thus also local employment, compared with larger organisations and research centra. By joining Gent BC, Outerthought wants to cut this longstanding prejudice short and try to bring a pragmatic, SME-reality-sized voice to this new innovation platform.

More specifically, in the context of Gent BC, we aim to further professionalize our R&D activities around Kauri and related web development methodologies, hopefully in collaboration with other Gent BC members. Also, we want to further steer the development of Daisy towards a leading framework for knowledge-centric content applications.

Summer fading away

2008-09-17T18:04:03.000+02:00

I don't know about you people out there, but we ordered our landlord already to ignite the central heating system as the days are getting chillier and chillier. Summer time has gone by again, and it's about time to put up a summer redux on our starving company blog. The usual excuse: we have been busy, and we prefer to focus on customers and projects.

I'm not sure if we're allowed to say so already, but we successfully delivered a first large Kauri-based project a couple of weeks ago. It's a ReST service layer for user-generated content, i.e. tags, annotations, polls, comments and such, and it's been designed for one of the world's largest media organizations. Let's say we learned a lot about scaling, partitioning, mysqlproxy and various other exotic (for us) technologies and concepts, and that we were happy to at least not have to worry about the Java-side of things, as that part of the application fitted extremely well with Kauri.

That, and one of our Outerthinkers becoming a proud twin-father (congrats, Karel!), another one getting married (congrats, Paul!), Freya who switched from a part-time to a full-time scheme, combined with a healthy dose of holiday leaves and such: yessir, it was summer chaos season again.

The next few weeks will be quite remarkable as well: it's been a serious while since we had a full house working on a single project. Our first big Kauri user is eagerly awaiting for his development team to hit the road with a first serious release, which means Kauri is getting our undivided attention these days.

And after that? Well, there's still and always Daisy 3.0 looming a bit further around the corner, but first we have to ship this Kauri baby. So if you excuse us for now, and join us in welcoming some more silence: we will be back!

Integrating Mollom with Daisy

2008-06-25T12:29:14.000+02:00

Hi! Please let me introduce myself: I am Freya and I'm the latest addition to the Outerthought team.

As a getting-up-to-speed project, I'm currently integrating Mollom - a webservice for spam filtering - in a blog comments extension in Daisy - the extension you would be using when leaving a comment on this blog.

Mollom is easy to use (it's based on XML-RPC calls) and works like a charm: if a comment is doubtful, it presents a captcha, it keeps statistics, and gradually a Bayesian database is built so more and more spam should get captured and ham gets through without captcha. Despite a few bugs (which were fixed by Mollom mostly on the day itself!) the integration was really easy - a great way for me to learn Daisy and its extension framework.

However, as it says on the website: Mollom is currently in public beta. So once in a while, things go wrong . Recently I had 2 days where I could not reach any Mollom server, which raised a few questions I wanted to share here.

If Mollom is down, what should we do with the comments posted at that time? Post the comments anyway, thereby letting the door wide open for spam? Disabling to post any comment and thereby keeping regular blog readers from posting a comment? Or should I opt for the solid engineering approach, and start queueing the comments and process them afterwards? In this case, we should also wonder: if Mollom is down and vast amounts of comments were post during this period: how is Mollom going to react if we send them all at once? What if all blog- and CMS-platforms would implement such a queuing feature, and start submitting unchecked comments to Mollom once it becomes available again?

I'm looking for a best practice here, so leave a comment (unchecked by Mollom ... yet) if you have an idea. And yes, the plan is that the entire blog (+ comments) application will be made available as well, as a simple yet non-trivial example of the Daisy extension framework.

Yay!

2008-06-24T07:45:25.000+02:00

Another day, another project

2008-06-12T15:36:38.000+02:00

Zap - another month has gone by. We're great at this blogging thing, aren't we? After Seth left the Outerthought HQ's building back to his homestead, May remained ever so busy.

Marc and Bruno, together with Jeroen and Ives from partner Schaubroeck have been working hard on the 0.2 release of Kauri, to the end that Bruno released a first runnable binary preview release on June 5th. Try it and tell us about it!

Paul, on his merry own, delivered a knowledge base system based on Daisy for Mitsubishi Equipment Europe in Almere, Holland and has started working on the last phase of the Competency Management system we're preparing for the Canadian Coast Guard College, and Karel has been fighting various assorted Java plug-in bugs in various assorted browser and OS combinations, preparing some very cool new feature for Daisy 2.3.

Alongside all this work, Freya joined us beginning of May as it became clear the success of Daisy and our other ventures was requiring extra staffing. Freya is currently working part-time and combining her learning curve of Daisy and related technologies with teaching students Java at the University College West Flanders. Her first learning project is to integrate Mollom spam checking with the commenting facility we're using for this very blog. Welcome, Freya!

Business- and strategy-wise, we have joined the new Gent BC initiative - a gathering of innovative organizations based in or around Ghent, and I've been so lucky to present at the annual V-ICT-OR conference. V-ICT-OR is the Flemish member society of IT folks at the local administrations, and part of my luckiness was that this presentation bought me the lottery ticket to meet and impress Richard Steel, president of the English (hence much larger) sister organization Socitm. Which means I'll have another go at my presentation during their annual conference as well.

Adding onto that, there's some interesting pre-sales things going on, however I won't try our luck and shut up about those until we got the signed PO. ;-)

Fireside Chat afterglow

2008-05-15T11:42:55.000+02:00

It's Thursday today, which means a week has already gone by since our first Fireside Chat. For those who haven't found out yet, I've posted some pictures on Flickr, and uploaded a presentation to Slideshare. They're embedded below this post.

First, the format. Seth Gottlieb did a one-hour presentation on his findings from the Open Source Java CMS report. That went well, and was a good warming-up exercise for the participants. The setting was as intimate and cosy as possible, with a live fireside (albeit an electronic one) and a sofa for full effect.

Next, we had two small (30') discussion rounds on a number of topics I had prepared. The group was divided in four sub-groups and they each had a quick tour-de-table of introducing themselves to each other. After each round, each group had to bring forward a presenter highlighting what had been said in a two-minute presentation with Marc and me serving as the flipchart secretary. Thereafter, topics were swapped between groups.

That facilitated discussion went really well, as the master of ceremonies I had great pains in tearing the groups away from their discussion table. Everyone wanted to carry on, though obviously time was limited. The fact we had two consecutive rounds was a good idea as well: it left some room for expanding on a given subject or picking up a statement from the previous group.

The topics were:

local open source: what is happening and what could be happening on the local open source scene in Belgium
content management in a webservices world
core technology in content management
standards in content management

Second, there's was a definitive "let's do this again" feeling at the end of the event. That, and the recent launch of GhentValley.be - a (LinkedIn) network for professionals hailing from or working in the Ghent area, is making me really happy these days. The success of these (unconnected) network events shows there's definitive room for such events in our area, and it's a great energy-boost for our day-to-day work.

Outside the fireside chat event, we took the opportunity of Seth being here to showcase new Daisy work and projects to him, and we had a nice time concluding his stay at the Amadeus - one of Ghent's better known sparerib restaurants. That, and perfect weather to show Seth around Ghent, were a recipe for a great one-and-a-half day of semi-vacation. :-)

I have some ideas about next editions I'll post in another blog. In the mean time, I'll be distributing Seth's presentation to the participants. Thanks a lot everyone to be there!

| View | Upload your own

Daisy Hackathon Day 2 (and final)

2008-04-11T19:06:50.000+02:00

That's it, we're done for the (second) day of our hackathon. And we got where we wanted: build a non-trivial, useful website using Daisy in two days (admittedly with 4.5 people - so that's 9 real days, and we had some stuff laying on our shelves as well obviously).

The result is available from http://gardemo.outerthought.org/ - it's a Flemish demo unfortunately, but the theme is a gardening company. It features some Google Map integration (use the GMap widget to select the location of a garden project), and a rather full-featured iPhone skin.

Kudos to everybody involved!

Daisy Hackathon day 1

2008-04-10T16:36:40.000+02:00

Loads of fun today (and tomorrow) during our Daisy demo hackathon. What we're trying to achieve is to build a fully operational, non-trivial company website that serves as a demo of some of Daisy's capabilities.

We've started the day setting out a theme (a garden design company) and a base document repository model, consisting of entities such as projects, products, workorders, and a classification hierarchy. Karel and Paul from there on started working on two skins, one for the intranet/public website, and one customized for the iPhone. Bruno is working on a spiced-up image uploader that will automatically transfer ("employee") photos from my digital camera to Daisy, and Marc is working on publisher requests and general navigation, while I'm already collecting some content to fill up the demo.

The first occasion to show our new demo will be during the 'Bedrijvencontactdagen' next week in Flanders Expo.

Restlet visitors

2008-04-02T22:15:21.000+02:00

Yesterday, we got two visitors from France: Jérôme and Thierry from Noelios Technologies. Noelios is the company behind restlet.org - a Java library for ReST-based application development, and the heart of Kauri's request handling.

We have been contributing to discussions on the restlet mailing list for a while now, some of our patches and bugfixes made it into the restlet source tree, and just last week one of Jeroen's patches was accepted as well. So it was time to meet face-to-face and especially learn more about the commercial entity behind all that ReSTy goodness.

It was great getting to know Jérôme and Thierry, as their ambitions and plans resonated a lot with how we started Outerthought seven years ago. A strong desire for independence, and most importantly a desire to create a setting for accomodating a technological vision: a great motivation to start your own company.

We presented both our companies to each other, discussed the general vision and future plans of both Restlet and Kauri, and even found some opportunities where we could contribute more to Restlet.

For instance, once the Kauri Template Language has sufficiently matured, and also because we've made sure it can be used without the Kauri runtime environment, we'll make sure to provide a KTL adaptor to Restlet, so that people can use KTL stand-alone inside their Restlet application.

'Ecosystem' was the word of the day. Meeting Noelios was a meeting of like-minded businesses, like-minded people behind the business facades, with a passion for software engineering and Doing The Right Thing. I'm hopeful that this meeting is but the start of an on-going conversation, and that this conversation will be mutually beneficial, for both companies, and for the Restlet and Kauri community at large.

Open invite: Daisy demo hackathon

2008-04-01T17:40:38.000+02:00

This is a spur-of-the-moment thing: an open invite for our Daisy demo hackathon.

We have three trade shows and demo sessions coming up in the next few weeks, thus we need to brush up some of our existing demoware with some casual and contemporary Web2.0 goodness. So on Thursday and Friday 10-11 April next week, we're having a Daisy demo hackathon. Think of a refresher of our photobooth demo, with GoogleMaps integration, think of OpenID, think of a rough intranet knowledge management tool, think of some Flickr API hacking. Nothing too serious, all perfectly feasible within a couple of good coding hours, but stuff good enough to show how easy it is to integrate Daisy with outerworldy services.

If you have some spare time, and would like to hang out with us and perhaps learn also a bit about Daisy's innards and extension hooks - stuff we habitually use during every Daisy project but which perhaps lacks from a bit of underexposure, feel free to join us! Even though the setting is very informal, I'm sure it will be educational for everybody.

Two conditions: we can host only two, maximum three extra hackers, and are required to bring your own computer, and skill set, obviously. Those skills could be anything however: it would be great if fpr example a skilled XHTML/CSS slice-and-dicer would be able to attend for instance, and learn some more about Daisy publisher requests, faceted browsers and link hierarchies in return for a n33t design.

In return, there'll be beer and pizza, and the winner for the coolest hack gets a big box of Geomag magnets for keepers. And eternal fame, of course.

Mail us if you want to be there: 10-11 April, in Zwijnaarde in our offices!

Outage

2008-03-31T20:02:28.000+02:00

Starting this afternoon around 17:00, some of our customers are affected by an outage at our hosting partner's datacenter. We're checking out status ourselves at the moment and apologise in the mean time. Our Kauri project server is affected as well.

Update: http://status.combell.com/ provides a bit more info - it's an electrical outage and presumably it will take quite a few hours to be solved.

Update 21:15: we're good again. Fingers crossed.

Kauri 0.1: the invitation release

2008-04-01T15:10:30.000+02:00

(Caveat: this post has been antedated for a day as our hosting provider posed us with some problems yesterday. And releasing on April 1st is sooo... well. This is genuine.)

In a few years from now, girls and boys all will have grown up to adulthood, but grown-up men and women aren't all equal. There'll be two groups: those who "were there", and those who didn't. This is a unique chance to be at the genesis of a new adventure: Kauri, that is.

Kauri is 'our' take at web application development, and 'us' are the people who brought you Daisy, and before that xReporter, and 'us' is a bunch of engineers heavily entrenched in the war zone of business services around open source development for almost seven years now.

We're confident we'll be able to pull this one of as well, and frankly: it is about time. A combined (let me count) 50+ years of Java software engineering skills, frequent contributors in past times to thriving research open source projects like Apache Cocoon, and now already 4 years down the roads of our Daisy adventure: it is about time for us craftsmen to whip up our own handicraft tools - for web application development, that is.

So without further ado, go and check out the 0.1 release of Kauri, and tell us what you think about it.

Here's the announce message from Marc on the kauri and restlet mailing lists:

We're very happy to announce the first "invitation" release of the Kauri
project http://kauriproject.org/

Our goal with Kauri is to bring a new style of web application development:

* by combining middle-tier and browser-side development techniques and
optimizing their interaction
* by offering a collaborative development environment for both technical
and design-oriented people
* by offering a pragmatic view on the ROA (Resource-Oriented
Architecture) -style of application development

Kauri is a Java-based framework and builds further upon the broad
shoulders of Maven, Spring, Restlet and jQuery.

This 0.1 "invitation release" is the first of a series of
early-and-often releases planned up until Autumn this year, and its goal
is to create some early buy-in with people who might eventually join the
effort.

What we achieved so far:

* we're past the planning phase and have started building real code
* we've released a first version of a Java templating language that
utilizes the power and flexibility of XML, and standard Java 'el' (juel)
or Groovy expressions
* we're releasing a run-time environment for Kauri "modules". This
run-time environment combines the well-known Maven repository layout
with dependency management using Spring and uniform resource interaction
using Restlet
* we have a first cut of a browser-based form handling subsystem based
on jQuery

You're all invited to check Kauri out and share your comments and ideas.

The Kauri Project Team
http://kauriproject.org/
--
message x-posted to kauri-developers <at> googlegroups.com and
discuss <at> restlet.tigris.org

In other words: Kauri combines the best of Spring, Maven, jQuery and Restlet with some Outerthought juice to form a framework for web development that works for the whole team.

The Kauri universe

2008-03-14T11:31:24.000+01:00

The work on Kauri is shaping up nicely. Last week we've passed the tipping point in the ratio of drawing-board time versus actual practical coding and assembly. Our progress in both areas can be followed on the project wiki (keep an eye on the recent changes feed) and the commit history on the project svn.

It's motivating work, but apparently to some people (namely a candidate for the job vacancy we interviewed this week) it is a line of action that requires motivation: Just why are you building (yet another) framework?

The classic attitude adopted by many framework teams is using the paradox logic: "The fact so many frameworks are out there already is the absolute motivation: this proves there is no clear winner yet!". Try to read that without sensing a decent amount of ambition coming from such a statement.

The ignorant 'just because' answer actually is equally solid and unsatisfying. We believe software builders should be building software. And since we think good software builders don't repeat themselves their work is likely to end in a framework. Solve the bigger problem, right? Everybody is doing so, we're just doing it out in the open. Knowing others will be looking over our shoulders make us think double. Don't ask why fish swim.

The downright pragmatical reasoning is to be found in reading up on the details of what Kauri is about and understanding the power and flexibility of having our own code base under our hands.

oOo

Looking at the answers the conclusion to make is that "Why are you doing ?" is the wrong question to ask. "How are you doing it?" is where the attention should go to.
The 'how' of Kauri is about assembly and combination, about doing one thing well, and mixing that in with the work of others. It is about participating in the neighboring projects we work with, picking up ideas, adding our own value.

Giving in to my poetic side I would compare this multitude of open frameworks to what oceans do with coast lines. It really is about convincingly reducing mountains into rocks, pebbles, gravel, sand and finally soil: along the path there is much flexible material that allows many building purposes :-)

From this view, I would say that people who just use a framework didn't get into the web era of programming yet. A framework is not an endpoint. Its community is an entry-point to this vast organic pool of shared memes that float between all of them and helps shape a common foundation.

To this regards, yesterday we moved out our 'kauri-template' code to a new 'universe' directory. There is a statement in that directory name: there you are to find all pieces of code that have no dependencies upon Kauri as a framework, but just share the name, branding, community origin. Pieces that are in their own right useable and reusable, regardless even of Kauri itself. So even if you don't opt for the entire Kauri proposition, there might be smaller juicy framework tidbits you could (or should?) be interested in.

In the case of our templating system this is also the prime reason why we've had to build our own. To our finding there was no other xml focussed templating system (in Java) that can easily be loosened from the bigger system that produced it. We are not done on the feature list yet, but we are convinced we made the essential cut right: KTL is a pure standalone templating system that will allow you to hook up your own variable context and source-resolution, plus extend on the template tags and expression functions.
Oh, did I mention it will efficiently process your templates?

Daisy 2.2 released

2008-03-17T14:45:55.000+01:00

Daisy 2.2 is out and sports some great new features: one above and a lot below the line. I'm talking user audiences here, not P&G speak. ;-)

The end-user-oriented feature sounds deceivingly more simply than it actually is: translation management.

Using the new TM feature, it is possible to create links between equivalent language versions (across document variants), and keep track of those links. You get a handy dashboard-like view showing you which document translations are out of sync with the reference language version. TM also provides a specialized export format, ideal for exchanging content with translation agencies, or to feed to-be-translated content into your Translation Memory system. We have one customer using Daisy together with Idiom WorldServer in that way.

Daisy 2.2 also contains many more below-the-line feature additions: finer-grained partial read access to document components, integration points for your own custom field editors, and a lot more little improvements.

Meanwhile, work in ramping up on Kauri, our holistic web application framework, and we will be hosting a fire-side conversation with Seth Gottlieb of Content Here.

As always, enjoy this new Daisy release, and do not hesitate to let us know what sucks and what rocks.

Fireside conversations: Seth Gottlieb on Open Source Content Technologies

2008-03-04T22:05:26.000+01:00

Last week, all stars aligned and a quick idea tossed on the table over lunch turned into Something Real. On May 8th, Seth Gottlieb will be joining us for a "Fireside Conversation" in or near the Outerthought offices.

Seth is a renowned content technologies analyst who recently has published the report I raved about last week. Not that everything was nice which Seth wrote about Daisy, but it showed my faith in industry analysts can now slowly be restored. A new breed of analysts is starting to appear, with Redmonk's Stephen and James leading the flock, providing the industry with less sterile (and more genuine) analysis and context.

We're very pleased and honoured that Seth will join us for our first Fireside Conversation. I've got the idea from my stay at the Open Source Thinktank, which demonstrated that an interesting conversation can be held amongst participants given 1. a common interest (even if views or opinions differentiate) and 2. some structural guidance. Our Fireside Conversations thus aim to attract an interesting mix of partners, contacts, customers and industry reporters, and will hopefully provide a breeding ground for new ideas and some fine discussions.

Fireside Conversations will be invitation-only (but free) events, and you can request your invitation here.

Daisy in landslide Open Source CMS Report

2008-02-27T10:04:47.000+01:00

Seth Gottlieb, head analyst of Content Here, a technology analyst firm with a sweet spot for everything CMS, has released his first Open Source CMS in Java Report last week, and Daisy is featuring prominently in this landslide document.

"Landslide? Isn't that a bit over the top?". Well, Seth's approach is quite unique amongst analysts, in the sense that Seth actually installs himself every product he's evaluating, and from my personal experience, takes his time to learn enough about it to ask really sensible questions. His 1 1/2 hour long phone interview, and the hefty follow-up email exchange we had showed the amount of effort he was putting in these reviews - I was impressed. Contrasting this with the fluffy stuff one finds elsewhere, his report was a totally refreshing take on what a good analyst report should consist of. Which is good enough as a stereotype change in order to use the 'landslide' metaphor. ;-)

Amongst many other Java-based Open Source CMSes, Daisy got a 20-page section in his review, and I must honestly confess that most of what Seth writes is genuinely clueful. For obvious reasons, I can't repeat Seth's conclusions here, unfortunately. And as usual, we felt that he really should have waited until the 2.2 release, where a number of his concerns would have been addressed, but -oh well- such is life.

Daisy got stuck in a category we're not necessarily happy with (I'm sure this is partly due to the limited number of categories being relevant when classifying 7 different CMSes), but the review itself is well done. And I just found out that Seth offers the possibility to buy selected portions of his review for a bargain price of 200US$. So if you want an independent view on what Daisy is capable of, head over to Seth's website and grab yourself a copy.

Introducing the Kauri project

2008-02-18T16:40:41.000+01:00

I'm done for the day writing offers so I figured I might as well write a little blog post on what keeps a good deal of Outerthought ticking these days... Kauri, that is. Kauri is our take at "holistic web application development", a posh way to say that we feel most other frameworks out there only cater for part of the problem.

While the idea of establishing our own webapp development tool chest has been -erm- frustrating us for more than a year now, it's been only since one proper month that we were able to pull together an actual team and get things going. There's four of us working on Kauri full-time these days, and we expect an alpha release somewhere in May. A lot of what we have been doing until now is design and selection.

Yes, selection, as we won't be building everything from scratch, but try to re-use useful stuff where applicable. On the current re-use list are sitting:

Other obvious re-use items will be Maven 2 and Spring. On the let's-do-this-ourselves-list are sitting the Kauri runtime and the Kauri template language.

We take the selection process pretty seriously. Here's Ives reviewing the browser/Javascript frameworks out there, and Jeroen's take on what the ideal template language for Kauri should do. As you see, we are trying to document the inception process as good as possible, to be able to sanity-check our thinking along the way, as a seed for documentation, but also hoping to tease developers into early contributions or comments - hence why we've already established a Kauri Google group as well. So if you'd like to discuss Kauri with us, sign up there.

Bruno is currently working on the Kauri runtime, the little runtime environment that'll sit underneath every Kauri-based website, and Marc is the jockey trying to shepherd all this energy into one direction. Which is going along just nicely, must I say.

I realize the "Why?" question hasn't been addressed yet. We have a vision document on the Wiki which lists some of Kauri's core values, and I'll help Marc and Bruno to create some teaser material in the forthcoming time. There's more reason to "Why?" than "Just because we can!" obviously, so we'll try hard to get that message across to our target audience: the Java architect responsible for selecting a framework to accommodate team-based web application development.

One of the reasons we started Kauri is our firm belief that a lot of half-baked stuff is available for exceptional developers. Unfortunately, "exceptional" is not what makes the Gaussian curve, well, curb, so we like to see Kauri evolve into something that is attractive and useful for all project participants, for all steps in the process, for all versions of the project deliverables, providing something for all tiers of modern (web) applications.

So if that tickles your brain, come and chat with us!

Outerthought is hiring

2008-02-14T20:17:35.000+01:00

We're currently on the lookout for a new colleague. He or she (a she would actually make for a nice change) will be joining our software engineering team for both project- and product-related work (on Daisy and Kauri). Self-starter, good think(st)er, decent Java skills, team player... the usual every company asks for, but we promise fun stuff to work on. We operate behind glass walls in a flat structure, and are confident that Outerthought is a Good Place for a skilled software engineer. More info on our website!