OSCOM2 TALK: day 1 presentations
Berkeley, California
Tom Weiss shares the notes he is taking down from presentations at the Oscom conference this week.
WebDav
The first presentation, by Greg Stein, covered WebDAV and in particular the Apache implementation, mod_dav. According to Stein, “WebDAV makes the web a writable medium”. Web browsers handle receiving files from a web server, and occasionally posting data back in a form. WebDAV allows files to be put back onto the server, and has received widespread support amongst commercial vendors.
The basic WebDAV protocol allows for files to be locked to prevent simultaneous editing by two users, but does not provide version control. An extended protocol for version control, called “Delta V” was agreed earlier this year but is not yet supported by any applications.
WebDAV is already supported in Dreamweaver, IIS, and Windows. With Windows XP, network drives may be mapped to WebDAV, making updating a web site as simple as saving a file to the hard disk. Many CMSs also provide built-in support for WebDAV as a file transfer protocol between client and server.
Comment: WebDAV is rapidly overtaking FTP as the standard for file transfer on the Internet, but without the version control functionality it is of limited use. Within a CMS environment it should be noted that although the WebDAV protocol allows for the separation of presentation from content, this is not supported in any of the currently available implementations.
www.webdav.org
Open Source Content Management Frameworks
Two open source frameworks were presented on the first day: Miguard and Zope. Both compete with commercial packages such as Vignette, and provide a toolkit for developing CMSs rather than an out-of-the-box solution.
Midguard was originally developed for the Finnish culture organisation, which is a non-profit organisation that decided to release the software as an open source project in May of 1999. There are dozens of companies developing sites using Midguard and several 100 sites running live on it. It runs on MySQL on Apache and is written in C/C++ and PHP, which is also used for the templating language. The key engine is the Apache module mod_midguard which handles page requests and passes them to PHP processes to build the site. As well as the basic application server, there are libraries providing database connectivity and replication.
Zope is primarily developed by Zope corporation, which makes money by bidding fixed price implementations at a lower cost than the competition. There are 100s of sites running on Zope, including 30-35 CBS sites which run at up to 600 requests per second.
Being a US built system there is little support for localisation, but the site does take a more generic approach to content than many and includes support for multimedia objects. The page template language is proprietary, based on Python, and the system supports template inheritance and multiple page views using different templates.
www.midguard.org
www.zope.com
XML Editors
XML editors prove to be one the most competitive area of the open source world, with both Bitflux and Xopus showing products that put their commercial counterparts to shame. WYSIWYG editing in the CMS world normally means the ability to add bold text or tables, but these editors allow true WYSIWYG editing of the web page as it appears to the end-user.
In much the same way as MS Word, content is selected on the page, edited, and then saved. There is no preview stage as the content literally looks exactly like the final page. In the case of Xopus this is because the same XSL template is used for editing as presentation. Bitflux requires a separate template, which does incur additional developer overhead, but if done correctly will have the same effect.
Comment: It is interesting that both of these products are produced by small companies, yet they beat the editing interfaces from the largest corporations. As yet, neither are fully integrated into any CMSs and it is likely that were a major CMS to incorporate a similar interface they would gain significant competitive advantage.
www.bitflux.org
www.xopus.org
www.oscom.org
Tim Weiss is a consultant with
www.clarkweiss.com
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