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Open Source CMS Solutions Based on Java?
namityadav asks: "I've been looking for an open source Content Management System (CMS) which is widely used / supported, and has features like web-logging, online communities, RSS feeds, forums, polls, calendars, website searching, and so on. The most obvious choices are Drupal (I've played with it in the past) and Joomla, however both of them are PHP based. Since I am a Java developer, I wanted to find something based on Java. To my surprise, I could find some very weak Java based alternatives to Drupal, like MMBase, OpenCMS and Magnolia. Why is it that there are so many PHP based open source CMS which are hugely successful (Drupal is used by The Onion, Spread Firefox, and more), but there is not even one comparable solution based on Java?"
I'm pretty sure he's talking about java on the server, delivering (x)html+css+javascript to browsers.
"Piter, too, is dead."
I don't think he was talking about running the Java application in the browser, but more in terms of servlets.
And to answer that question, look at the target market of Java. Java is not intended for mom'n'pop websites, or for novice web builders, nor bloggers. Hosting support isn't widespread and is quite expensive. PHP hosts are a dime-a-dozen.
If you can afford large scale Java hosting, you likely are developing your application from scratch using your own development team.
I think the reason you don't see many Open Source Java CMS tools is due to fairly weak Java support with most Web hosting providers. Take a look at the available webhosts, and very few over support for Servlets/JSP. I would think, on average, the most common user of a CMS system would be someone wanting to setup a small to medium website that won't require too much customization outside of the standard package. Of course, the systems available are powerful (Drupal, Plone, Joomla, Nuke), but for the most part the people using them don't need the majority of the powerful customization tools. These are also the same people who would be using Web hosting packages, and not setting up their own servers. Therefore, you have to write it in a language that is almost universally supported by web hosting providers, like PHP.
I can't believe you have a UID that low and still don't know the difference between applets and server side Java.
Having a low UID isn't evidence of tech knowlege.
Maggie Leber CCP, SCJP, SCWCD
-=Maggie Leber=-
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'm a construction worker and the other day I was thinking about baking a cake. As it turns out, I'm having a heck of a time finding a cake-batter mixing machine that runs on diesel.
I am a Java developer and I have worked for a commercial CMS vendor. Essentially, the low end of the market is dominated by php for obvious reasons: it's easy to get started and basically any hosting will do since it will run php out of the box. Also that stuff is pretty good: I'm perfectly happy with wordpress for my low end needs.
On the other hand with Java there are no cheap hosting solutions. Basically it requires a a dedicated server solution which will set you back 50-100 $ per month minimum. There are shared hosting facilities but they are still more expensive and don't really give you enough control. People with low end needs won't even consider that as an option, and they shouldn't.
However, there's also such a thing as the high end of the market. Basically php is just one of the many options there and as far as I can see it far from dominates that market. A lot of interesting things are happening in the Java enterprise scene: there is standardization of content repositories (JSR 170) with several commercial and OSS implementations available; there is the portlet standard, which is basically the backbone of many commercial portal servers; there are lots of options for implementing web UI stuff; there is adoption of the cool rails stuff with both groovy and jruby on rails being worked on; etc. Essentially Java is one gigantic toolkit for building web applications now.
Bottom line is that if you are expecting to spend a few thousand dollars on hosting (yearly) and have a budget of say 20K+ for building the web site, you are in the high end of the market. You will want some guarantees about your site not collapsing when a few million people decide to drop by; you'll probably have some old content to migrate and some non trivial functionality that you'd like to have. Chances are that you'll end up using Java. Or rather, chances are that you decide not to reinvent the wheel and use the services of some professional CMS companies.
Jilles
Ok, I know I'm being trolled by a self-styled fanboy, but what things exactly?
No it has not. PHP is still fundamentally the same language it was all the way back in 2002.
And if you're going to argue about versions of PHP, might I also point out that PHP has broken forward compatibility twice . Version 4.4 changed the behaviour of references in an incompatible way, and PHP 5.0 makes many more changes to the core language. This places shared hosting providers in a very difficult position and many simply choose to run the old version 4.3, for which most PHP code was written for.