Thoughts on …

One of my latest R&D assignment was to find a CMS system that can be easily integrated with a Flex/Flash front end and work as a Data Service prvider. Basically I was looking for an opensource CMS project that would do all the data/content management and offer the stored data as a service to a Flash enabled front end.

I started by having a look at the most popular CMS out there and see how easy/quick are they to be changed to suite my needs. Looked at Joomla, Typo3, Drupal but none of them where really designed with WEB2.0 in mind maybe except the latest Joomla, built on CakePHP (port of Rails) with a somewhat MVC approach. Joomla did offer the basic Data like services, but since this is the first version using CakePHP the community contributes, that usually makes an open source project great, are kind of missing so it will be a while … and since no standard/protocol of communication is enforced I would say that every contributor will come with his own way of sending things to the front end.

Than I even bought a license of FlashBlocks BIG MISTAKE … the software is totally unusable, if I give to an owner that tool to maintain it’s own site … I should be expecting lots of support calls back and a quite unhappy client on the other side of the line.

The conclusion was that we will have to make our own CMS system for a RIA like website, looking for frameworks to build on I came across the IGENKO project, in a very early stage but good enough to have it as a starting point.

So we decided to get involved with the project and start contributing, solved a couple of issues and added Prana Framework to it for future scalability.

Ideas and thoughts are always welcomed so feel free to join the mailing list ask questions and even contribute .

You can read more on Igenko here.

A very nice Inversion of control container that leverages the flexibility and loose coupling for Flash/Flex applications. Use it with confidence.

Will be posting a how to tutorial soon, so keep watching. Meantime you can read more on the subject.

What a better way to start a blog other than after a good conference.
360Flex first edition in Europe was a good experience for me, a place to meet and share experience and ideas.

I am sure you can find lots of feedback and related information just google 360 Flex Europe.

A kind of sad reality that came out of this conference is that there are very few Flex developers in Europe and not very much is known about it. But it is encouraging to see that there are people who want to learn it and use the Adobe’s technology to bring innovation to the web.

As a contribution to this process I am going start blogging about Flex, and share my experience with it on how we create RIA.

In other words watch this space as I will try to make it a good resource for the Flex/Flash developers and help spread the word.

Looking forward to the next 360 conference, hope they will bring a new 360Flex to Europe, I will surely attend.