Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Ektron eWebWP A FlashMX-based WYSIWYG text editor. I played with one of the demos - web-based e-mail client - they need to have a view source function in the demo 'cause I am curious what kind of html it generates. I wish their GUI was a bit more *fun* - I mean, this is flash! 8:21:01 PM    comment []

Friday, October 25, 2002

The Avalon Project Avalon Project - "The Avalon project is an effort to create, design, develop and maintain a common framework and set of components for applications written using the Java language." The Component Lifecycle bit is very interesting - links to OOP best practices, patterns, and other good stuff. Disciplined programming! 8:02:53 PM    comment []

Getting closer to blogging with a killer GIU WYSIWYG Blogediting. "I'm almost done integrating Xopus in CocoBlog" [...] [Be Blogging] "CocoBlog is a free weblogging software tool based on Apache Cocoon and Apache Xindice." Xopus is simply amazing. 10:53:10 AM    comment []

Saturday, October 19, 2002

TTW WYSIWYG Editor Widgets Great list of WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get" ) editors that can be applied to Content Management Systems. 4:38:47 PM    comment []

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Ekit "Ekit is a program & applet that uses the Java 2 libraries to create an HTML editor. The Ekit standalone also allows for HTML to be loaded and saved, as well as serialized and saved as an RTF. It is approaching its first production release version." I wonder how Ekit is being used with content management systems? If it could hook it *easily* within my current CMS, I would use it. It does all the basic stuff pretty well - text styling, cut/paste, tables, etc. 1:00:50 PM    comment []

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

XML::Comma While checking out Allafrica.com's website, I noticed that it is powered by a perl-based open source content management system called XML::Comma. Content is created and stored as XML files, and then indexed by a relational database such as mysql. Nice approach that is quick and easy to maintain. And it's perl! 11:46:39 AM    comment []

AllAfrica.com's RDF/RSS Headline Modules This is a wonderful service - RSS modules of news feeds from AllAfrica.com. This is a pretty good news service - About AllAfrica.com: "posting over 700 stories daily in English and French and offering a diversity of multi-lingual streaming programming as well as a 400,000-article searchable archive (which includes the archive of Africa News Service dating from 1997)." They offer over 80 different feeds, also in French. Be sure to follow their RDF/RSS Headline Modules instructions to get the correct URL. For example, if you are interested in an RSS feed for news about Mali, the URL would be: http://allafrica.com/tools/headlines/rdf/mali/headlines.rdf or you could find the link from NewsIsFree, which massages the URL into several useful forms. 11:32:58 AM    comment []

Monday, October 14, 2002

Groking MVC patterns I am looking at refactoring a Content Management System I developed two years ago, and guess what? There's alot I want to change. So, I am learning alot about recent changes in Cold Fusion, our application server and Fusebox, which is the methodology we used on this project. I am very interested in MVC patterns and am trying to learn how they work with Fusebox. Here are some links to very useful sites: Fusebox.org - A great resource that provides order to potential spagetti code. Techspedition.com - Their fuseQ approach is really neat - I am using their core file instead of the standard fusebox core. Benorama Cold Fusion Best Practices - This guy, while not a fuseboxer, has some nice explanations of MVC and sample code. Brian Kotek's CF page - Nice FuseQ Example App that has an MVC approach My notes from seaching newsgroups - Bit and pieces I picked up 4:27:47 PM    comment []

Friday, October 04, 2002

Reaching Content Management System Nirvana Just caught this article this morning: PHP and PostgreSQL Open Sesame I really dig what they are doing with php and postgresql. But approaching the topic of content management from a sustainable coding perspective, I am looking harder at the approach taken by the apache coccon folks. The problem I see with markup language approaches such as pHp and Cold Fusion is that the logic easily gets mixed-up with the presentation layer. To their credit, projects like fusebox are attacking that problem. Still, I am looking fascinated by Xopus, a "browser based in-place wysiwyg XML editor", and how it could tie into the Coccon framework. The demo crashes and burns in my Mozilla build (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20020930) but works brilliantly in IE6. If this really works, a few of my must-have bullet points will be there: Separation of logic and style (Apache Coccon) Nice user-friendly in-place editing (Xopus) Open source goodness I am also following the mozdev.org Composite project, which "is a chrome overlay which enables a streamlined Mozilla Editor for html composition in textareas." It does not work in-place - yet - and is a tad buggy in my build of Mozilla, but it certainly shows promise. 11:00:22 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Chris Kelley.