Plans for future development

Well, I'm finalizing the very first alpha version of my new CMS I'm developing for about four months now. So I decided to share a few plans of mine for the nearest future (next school year). As you may think the first thing is to finish the CMS, which I think will be really cool and will change the way people use CMS (but that's probably very optimistic :-) ). The CMS is Java-based, uses Hibernate for persistence and is designed to run in Tomcat. I have still a lot of work to be done to solve many issues from missing features to performance, but I'm quite happy with the results I'm getting now. So I made some time to write this post. The sad thing for most of you is probably the fact that it won't be open source probably. And I can't even tell you the features of CMS as it's "confidential". However one part of the CMS will be open source. The part is the templating system code-named FinalShape. FinalShape is templating system slightly similar to Apache Velocity. Unlike Velocity FinalShape is directly designed for being used in web environment. FinalShape is in fact alternative for JSP, ServerFaces, Servlets and similar stuff. Unlike servlets and similar FinalShape templates can't contain any executable code and can be safely used by non programmers to design HTML websites. In the CMS (I'm working on) web designer can safely change the template from the administration interface in runtime without any redeployment needed.

From other features I consider important are already implemented:

• internationalization and localization support on template engine level
• compilation of templates avoiding re-parsing templates again and again
• 2-level caching (cached are both compiled form of templates and rendered pages)
• compression support (all cached pages are compressed and passed to browser compressed if browser supports HTTP compression, otherwise the page is uncompressed before passing to browser - this minimizes memory used by cache and minimizes traffic)
• structured documents support (nested blocks)
• commonly used built-in page elements and possibility to implement custom elements
• many other minor features :-)

OK. That sounds good, doesn't it? So when can you expect to download FinalShape and it's source code? - In early 2008. I know that doesn't sound soon, but I have a lot of other stuff to do and FinalShape needs some minor tweaks yet, some source code cleaning and also some documentation to help you start.

I have also another cool project in progress, but I will tell you about it sometime later. I would like it to be my dimploma thesis, so as soon as I find some guarantor and the topic gets public I'll write more about it here.