Cromoteca

The English part of my blog is mainly technical. If you can read Italian, check the Italian section for articles of other kind.

I was not aware of the existence of Quercus, a PHP implementation written in Java. It runs as a servlet and is not limited to Resin, so I dropped the JAR in MeshCMS 4 (which I run on Jetty at the moment), and added index.php to the welcome file list to mark .php as a page extension. This is how the Quercus test page looks without any change:

This is very important, since MeshCMS 4 allows to create modules and themes using any scripting language, like JSP, Freemarker and, from now on, PHP.

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I just recorded a video while playing with the current MeshCMS 4 development code. It contains some random tests, showing some cool features:

• creation of a new page
• page editing
• switching between draft and published version of the page
• usage of modules
• file manager with integrated control panel
• drag&drop to order pages and modules

The application is run in GWT development mode, so it's slower than it will be when compiled to JavaScript.

There is A LOT of work to do yet before it can be released, but the big part has been done, as you can see. FYI words between asterisks *** like this *** are just markers for text that needs to be put in better form in resource bundles.

Please comment and share!

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I've heard of many people criticizing GWT, some of the most common reasons are that it translates Java into JavaScript, that web sites are not desktop applications, and that GWT uses Java to write code. Well, here's my thoughts on these points.

I've always looked at GWT like a very interesting technology, but I only recently introduced myself to real GWT development to create the admin interface of MeshCMS 4 (my own GPL CMS). I'm really impressed, and I'm writing this post to point out how I think one should look at GWT.

GWT is neither Java nor JavaScript

Let me clarify what I mean. Sure, you use Java syntax and Java tools when developing (I'm a NetBeans fan for what it's worth). But in a certains sense you're not writing real Java code, since you're not targeting the Java VM. But clearly you're not writing JavaScript, and you can't use closures and such. If you write GWT code thinking about JavaScript, you've missed the whole point. Yes, it will become JavaScript…

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Finally I've found the perfect tool for inline popups: ColorBox by Jack Moore. It's a jQuery plugin that works like a charm without any kind of issue, opens everything from images to galleries to iframes, and needs no configuration at all, unless you want to set some options. I'll use it in MeshCMS 4, but it's so good-looking I held my nose and edited the gallery of MeshCMS 3.5 to support it.

Another big plus is that five themes are available in the dowload, so probably everybody will find one that suit their needs. My favorite is #5: nice and does not require transparent images, so no special tricks on IE6.

Thank you Jack!

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As usual, I'm spending part of my weekend developing MeshCMS 4. Before entering the real topic of this post, let me show you the very first page served by MeshCMS 4 with a real theme, although incomplete. I'm very satisfied with MeshCMS 4, which is approaching its first alpha at a very fast pace.

That said, I want to let you know about compatibility with MeshCMS 3. I'm not very concerned about that, since I'm not using MeshCMS for my business (I'm employed by a company that work on the .NET platform and has its own commercial CMS). I have few sites to convert to MeshCMS 4 when it will be ready, so it's not big deal for me. Things might be different for others though.

Since MeshCMS is file based, moving files to the new installation is enough to have pages recognized and added to the site map as usual. But MeshCMS pages not always are plain HTML: there are modules, and MeshCMS 4 modules have been completely redesigned, with no one-to-one matching with old ones. Furthermore,…

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