Apache Rave is a new Web and Social mashup engine. Right out of the box it will provide an extensible, lightweight Java platform to host, serve and aggregate Open Social Gadgets and services – all through a highly customizable friendly UI.

It's like a portal - but without the portal. Instead of heavy weight, expensive, server-side Java portlets, Rave is taking a more modern approach focusing on client side rendering of Gadgets and Widgets.

I like the Rave concept because it’s built and targeted to be an engine for web sites, intranet portals and social network channels. I believe that these things will eventually blend into one thing - and become the building blocks of every website. I see more and more demand for portal like behavior in websites - as well as social aspects and personalization. Intranets have traditionally been very behind the firewall, but the trend is to move more and more of the organization's internal apps to the cloud. At the same time, people start to understand that a business really is and has always been a true social network - and that a more social approach to intranets is the future. Rave brings all this together. And I'm thrilled to be part of it!

Mark my words: in 5 years time, every website will be personalized and socialized.

Thank you so much for being part of the Hippo Community!

We want you to know that we value your feedback a lot - it's what makes our community such a great place to be :)

We'd love it if you'd use the following form to let us know how you think we're doing. If you have any thoughts on what we should improve to make your life as a Hippo developer easier, then please go ahead and put it in. Anything goes. No fields are required - just give us as much info as you like to. And...

... we're giving away 5 €20 ITunes Gift Cards amongst the first 50 fully completed forms!

Thanks for helping us build a kick-ass content management system!

Arjé Cahn,
CTO, Hippo

And, we really strive to keep that community alive with our “extended team” (that’s you!) as well.  We want every single developer and architect that works on Hippo CMS to feel like they’re part of something really cool – and ultimately really important.

I really want to stress that with our latest set of releases – including 7.5 and our newest 7.6 that we’re focusing a lot of attention on feedback that we’ve gotten both from beginner Hippo developers – all the way through to some of the most advanced developers out there.

Our whole goal is to innovate the world of Java Open Source Web Content Management – and certainly we know that developers are a huge piece of that.   Over the coming weeks, I’m going to blog about some of these innovations in more detail.  But in case you haven’t kept up with some of our latest developments - here are some of them under the headings that we’re most passionate about:

Open Source & Open Standards 

Our passion for Open Source and Open Standards started 10 years ago – and we’re continually trying to stay innovative: from our most recent work and contributions to the Apache Foundation, to Open Social and our latest work with Surfnet and the MITRE Corporation.  And, we’re listening to you as well.  We heard you loud and clear.  Some of the recent new things in Hippo CMS include:

• Relaxed CND’s – making it much easier to set up document types
• A New HST REST Engine – giving developers an easy and standard way of accessing all their content.  
• Run & Develop Easier With Cargo Support
• JRebel Support to speed up your development cycle
• CMIS Support adds interoperability with ECM Systems (see what we’re doing with Nuxeo)
• Support for Spring MVC (also read this excellent post by Jeroen Reijn on Spring Android and REST)
• Handling changes in a DTAP environment

Templates & WCMS Developer Support

Of course one of the biggest jobs as a CMS developer is to quickly support the business users and their need to “change” things and keep up with the latest technologies.  From the expanded use of JavaScript, to HTML5, CSS3 and of course mobile and social interfaces - We’ve heard the community loud and clear that we needed to continually innovate. 

The ability to support rich user experiences and mobile interfaces is becoming a “must-have” for Web content management systems.  Our newest releases meet this challenge – providing Hippo CMS users the ability to develop any kind of HTML5 front-end experience that they wish.

Some of the other new things here include:

• Hippo CMS Template Composer
• Freemarker Template Support
• Pugpig - ok, it may not a Hippo project - but it’s really slick framework for HTML5 driven tablet magazines that we’re currently experimenting with (did I forget to mention PhoneGap?)

Love For The Process

And, of course, as I said in the beginning – the real passion is to make sure that we’re helping developers to make the process easier and more efficient.  So, we’ve added a whole new set of resources here for the developers.  These include:

• Our new Hippo Trail – which is a full set of documentation and videos that walk you through from taking your “first steps” all the way through to “Hippo Awesomeness”.
• Automatic Export – which makes it so much easier for the development team to work together using a revision control system like Subversion.
• Console Improvements – We’re adding a number of new enhancements here including auto completion.

As I said in the beginning – over the coming weeks, I’ll blog a bit more detail about some of these exciting new features and approaches.  In the mean time, keep the feedback coming.  We’re here for the community – and we want to see both you and Hippo shine!

JCR is an engineering standard that's been around for a number of years. It's low-level. It's used by developers to build complex applications, usually on top of a content repository. Content management applications - like Hippo CMS - have been using JCR for years.

And, that's the point. JCR is a standard for developers. It's not a standard that will help you reach out to your audience. It's not a publishing standard in a format such that your visitors can consume it on their laptops, mobile phones or whatever device they want to use. It's not a standard that's going to help your Web content be "context-aware".

This is what REST API's and other Web standards are for. Our view at Hippo is that we do JCR for CMS Developers, and Web and REST for your audience.

There is no "Holy Grail" of standards, or one standard to "rule them all". It's clear to us that the evolving world of standards moves continuously and we believe that a WCMS needs to be flexible and open enough to move along side them. And, because standards evolve, they have a life of their own. They come to life, evolve and eventually they die. It's a very healthy process. So, yes, JCR evolves and will one day die. Just like CMIS will evolve - and one day die.

But the death of a standard doesn't matter to our customers. Our customers want interoperability. Our customers want our systems to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to export content out of a CMS whenever they want to replace it with another system. Standards are good. They give you that interoperability. But open standards are like languages. It really doesn't matter that they evolve. All that matters is that we can communicate.

If you're deciding on a content management system, you shouldn't need to worry about the life and death of standards. What matters most is that you want a CMS that serves your audience. For that you need to look further than just whether any vendor slaps the JCR or CMIS sticker on their repository. Look for a CMS that has openness built into its DNA. A CMS should breathe open standards. Look for a CMS that thinks in terms of your audience and how to deliver content in the way they want to consume it - not how the developer decided it should be consumed. At the end of the day, an effective CMS not only stores content in a way that empowers the business to manage it; it delivers the content in a way that empowers the person at the very end of a CMS - the audience - to consume it.

"On March 31, 2010, the first version of www.rijksoverheid.nl went live. This common website for all government ministries will make the central government more recognizable and accessible." (source: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl)

"Starting in 2010, the Dutch national government will communicate via a single website: www.rijksoverheid.nl. The various ministries will be added to the website in stages. As of its launch on 31 March, 5 ministries are currently active on this website. During the course of the year, the other ministries will be added." (source: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl)

I have to admit: our government has been very ambitious right from the start of this humongous project. The goal they set for themselves is not an easy one: to open up all information, in every possible way, using "Open Content, Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source".

It's no secret that this new grand website is based on a large set of open source components, among which many Apache projects, and of course my personal pride Hippo CMS. Hats off to Apache for being such a great open source community, and for being the foundation and source of inspiration for everything we do at Hippo!

"The government doesn't want to be tied to certain suppliers and licenses and therefore chooses for open standards and open source. [..] Using open standards will make it easier to exchange information with other government websites"

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this mega project, in particular everyone at ONS, Gerrit, Jettro, Michael, Gemma, all the JTeam guys, and of course the people here at Hippo: Bart, Berry, Frank, Ard, Stephan, Dennis, and the man who should receive an award for being the hardest working man in CMS business: Jeroen Reijn (maybe one day, he will :) ).

Suppose Joe is our author and he's working on a new article that he wants to push live. He requests publication, and sends the article off to his editor, Jane, for review.

I'm logging in as Jane now, and I can see the request that she got. Jane is fine with the article, so she pushes it live.

A couple of days later, Joe the author comes in again, and he changes some of that content he wrote before. And he requests publication again.

Jane logs in, sees the requests and wonders: What's new?

Hold it here - I need to explain some background. Of course we have versioning and history and all that. Every CMS does. But how easy is it to get to that comparison view? How many clicks do you have to perform to compare the current version of the document with the one that's online right now? And what kind of a view does it give you? How often do you do this? And if it would be *super* easy, wouldn't you just want to see that comparison view all the time? All in all, you're working with a team of editors in the same content pool and you need that contextual information about what's going on in the system, and who did what, where.

So that's what we did. We made it uber-super easy!

Click it - and there you go! That's what's new. Hippo CMS shows you the comparison view right there when you view the article. That is, when something has changed. It simply shows you the difference between the current version of the document and the one live on the website. How useful is that? If you need more information - you can of course dive into the version history, but this simple comparison view is probably all you need.

Again - we hope to be releasing this with Hippo CMS 7.4 in June, so hold tight.

In the meantime, let me know what you think - feedback is very much appreciated.

Wikis gave users the possibility to quickly create and collaborate on content, but they don't come with the visual application integration that Portals offer. And they lacked the degree of control of a decent content management system. Integrating Portal and CMS is more than just adding a 'content portlet'. Adding an in-context application to a Wiki page would be more in line with how users think. They navigate your online consumer portal, find a page that answers their question and then they want to act on it directly. The FAQ page on “How to request a new password” should render the “New password” portlet in-line with the article. This is just an example - but this is clearly the direction Wikis are heading as they're maturing towards something that resembles an integration of Portal and CMS, and they're leaving traditional Portals way behind.

Portal vendors need to move towards the Content Driven Portal. At least, this is direction we've chosen to go with Hippo Portal. Users want URLs that make sense, that say something about the information that can be found on a page. They want to pop the URL of a portal page into an email and send it to someone else and it should just work - within the appropriate security constraints of course. What applications are shown on the portal page should follow the context, not the other way around. People got used to this concept during the Wiki revolution, and they'll never want to go back.

“There is no printing facility for content in Hippo CMS so everything has to be done on screen. Even if we could print, we can only see a single field, not the whole article, so it's a bit pointless trying to proofread this way. This leads to long periods of time staring at a screen. It's also very difficult to spot typos on screen, leading to potential loss of quality in copy.”

Exactly. Often enough, also I spot typing errors only after having printed out my text (like this blog post), and walking through it again while commuting on the train. The letters start to dance before my eyes when I’m behind a monitor for too long. Sometimes it helps a lot to just put your text aside, do something else for a while, and then return to it on a quiet moment to walk through what you’ve written. So, why not implement a printing functionality in Hippo CMS, to allow authors to take their text with them? Everybody got so used to printing out Word documents anyway, that it baffles me that this idea had never appeared to me before.

So I put the print function on our roadmap.

But somehow, it feels wrong. What happened to the paperless office? It’s almost 2010 (it’s the 31st of December, 11:45 in the morning, as I write this), Kopenhagen happened only a few weeks ago, I’ve been driving the most economical car on earth for years, and I use the printer as little as possible. I don’t want to have a tree cut down for me to be able to proof-read my blog post!

Enter the e-reader. 2009 was the year of the e-reader. A number of those devices already boost a keyboard and the possibility to add annotations to texts, to store them and synchronize them with your PC. And every modern writer nowadays carries an e-reader to read their books anyway, right?

So here’s the thought: let’s make a tool that allows you, after a long day of writing, to take all the texts you’ve worked on with you on your e-reader. You grab your reader again when you sit on the train, where you walk through all passages for typos and make annotations. The following day, you import all those changes back into Hippo, or maybe you’ve already sent them to the content repository over wireless email.

I don’t know whether the latest generation of e-readers are already open enough to share annotations with a content management system. Maybe we’ll have to wait for that to happen in 2010. But at least I found a very good excuse to rush downtown and treat myself with another gadget to go try it out!

Join us for a third year of Apache Meetups! Users, committers, managers and developers will come together on the evenings of Monday 2nd, Tuesday 3rd, Thursday 5th of November .

Registration is free of charge, and everyone is invited. Register on the meetup wiki pages:

Monday 2nd (BarCamp Apache during the day)

• 20:00 - 22:00 NoSqlMeetup Room 1&2
• 20:00 - 22:00 Tomcat Room 6

Tuesday 3rd (BarCamp Apache during the day)

• 20:00 - 22:00 Lucene Room 1&2
• 20:00 - 22:00 OSGi/Felix Room 3
• 20:00 - 22:00 Traffic Server Podling Room 4

Thursday 5th

• 20:00 - 22:00 Content Tech 1&2
• 20:00 - 22:00 Web Services 3
• 20:00 - 22:00 SocialAndWidgetsMeetup
• 20:00 - 22:00 Web Crawlers Room 5
• 20:00 - 22:00 Hadoop Room 6
• 20:00 - 22:00 Subversion Room 7

If you're interested in any of these popular open source projects, come join us for an evening of presentations and discussion with the creators and committers working on the projects themselves.

Hosted by and located at the ApacheCon, these five special community meetings are taking taking place on the days before the ApacheCon conference in Amsterdam. Entrance is FREE for everyone, so sign up quick!

Location
Marriott Oakland City Center
1001 Broadway | Oakland, CA 94607 | +1 510 451-4000

What is a Meetup?

• Focused on a single Apache project
• Organized by the members of the project community itself
• Open agenda, anyone can propose a talk, covering a wide range of subjects related to the core project
• An opportunity for users, interested people and committers to get together

MeetUps generally happen during the evening, and, most importantly, are supposed to be fun (as well as useful).

ApacheCon is the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), drawing ASF Members, innovators, developers, vendors, and users to experience the future of Open Source development. Drawing internationally-renowned thought-leaders, contributors, influencers, and organizations in the Open Source community, ApacheCon offers insight into the culture and community that develops and shepherds industry-leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server - the world's most popular Web server software for ten years running.

About ApacheCon US 2009

These special Apache Meetups are organized as free side events next to their bigger sister conference, the ApacheCon US 2009.

ApacheCon is the official user conference, trainings, and expo of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Celebrating its landmark 10th Anniversary, ApacheCon US takes place November 2 - 6 at the Marriott Oakland City Center, California.

The global conference series gives attendees a 360-degree view into the highly lauded community that develops and shepherds industry-leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server - the world's most popular Web server software. ApacheCon offers participants the opportunity to deepen their understanding of Open Source methodologies and further advance their participation with like-minded peers in a relaxed, community-focused environment. More than 500 users, developers, and thought leaders are expected to attend.

With engaging keynote addresses, technical presentations, informal networking, Birds-of-a-Feather discussions, and entertaining social events, ApacheCon US 2009 gives participants the opportunity to choose from more than 60 sessions at the beginner, intermediate, and expert level. From mission-critical implementations to groundbreaking technologies, incubating projects, and collaborative development, ApacheCon presenters and faculty are passionate about some of the hottest issues at the heart of the industry.

Register today at http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/about.

Build a CMS plugin, a portlet, a repository addon, an HST component, or something else that you think is cool enough to turn into an open source Hippo Forge project. The core Hippo developers will be there to help build the Hippo component you always dreamed of! A Google Analytics plugin, an image resizer, a Jira portlet, a Lightbox HST Component, you name it. You can sign up here.

Whether you're an experienced Hippo hacker or a complete newbie, come join us for some proper coding fun, beers and food. If you don't know where to start - we'll help you get on track :)

We'll spend half a day on pure hacking galore, a big BBQ, beers, and of course: geeky prizes! Bring your laptop and we'll take care of the rest.

What: First international Hippo Forge Friday

When: October 30th from 14.00 until 21.00

Where:
Hippo Office Amsterdam: Oosteinde 11, 1017 WT Amsterdam
Hippo Office San Francisco: 185 H Street, Suite B, Petaluma, CA 94952

Why: A fast paced, hands-on introduction to Hippo. Get to know Hippo by writing plug-ins, HST components, portlets, and all things Hippo-like. Gain eternal fame by winning one of our prestigious prizes!

Who: All Java developers and web enthousiasts.

Registration: Make sure you sign up early by filling in the Forge Friday sign up form.

More info: Read Tjeerd's blogpost about the last Forge Friday and keep an eye on the Wiki page.

This lead to the creation of the Hippo Site Toolkit 2. We wrote a bunch of libraries, for which we borrowed some brainpower from our Apache Portals guys, that offer us a lightweight templating framework. The result is a toolkit that can be used in a wide variety of web technologies. But there's more. Our initial requirements for the HST were:

• Support JSP templates out of the box
• Implement a component framework that allows reuse of functionality
• Make components sharable on the Hippo Forge
• Allow a user of the CMS to design the entire URL space
• Enforce proper seperation of logic and presentation, by borrowing some concepts from the Portlet 2.0 spec (especially the action/render phase)
• Let the CMS user define which component, template and selection of content to render on which particular URL
• Make all website menus editable from within the CMS
• Take care of connection pooling, caching, and all that
• Don't tie in content with presentation - so content can always be reused in a different medium
• And, to wrap it up: HST components should run inside a portal as Portlet 2.0 compliant portlets with no extra coding

Already quite ambitious, we wanted to be sure that we would be able to extend the HST so it would also offer us an abstraction layer towards:

• Freemarker and Velocity templating
• JSF, Wicket and SpringMVC
• (J)Ruby
• REST
• CMIS
• .. and what not :)

I need to thank Ard, Woonsan and Ate for their hard work on the HST. But in this post, I wanted to focus a bit on Arthur's recent work, who has been working on the HST Configuration Editor. This is the user interface for the HST inside the CMS, which is being developed as a plugin within the HST project (see http://www.onehippo.org/site-toolkit).

In this video Arthur is telling me about his latest work on the HST Configuration Editor (as of July 2009). There are lots of sneak peak juicy screens to enjoy. Watch in full screen HD for best results!

Arthur does a quick walk through of the different parts of the HST Configuration Editor and demonstrates what is possible with the demosuite right out of the box. The demosuite is available as a download from http://www.onehippo.org/site-toolkit/home.

The two major changes to the document type editor are:

• Compound document types: reusable snippets that you can design using the document type editor, and then add to other document types. When the compound is changed, all document types that use the compound will reflect these changes as well. This allows you to develop very complex document types, with all kinds of hierarchical structures in your content.


• Layouts: both document types and compound document types now support a number of layout possibilities. Layouts like horizontal or vertical orientation, multiple columns with different sizes, etc, are now configurable for every template. This is a very powerful tool when used together with compound types!

Frank explains in only 1 minute and 36 seconds how you can now use compound documents, as well as the layout mechanism. Watch in full screen for best results!

This is a preview of functionality that is being developed for our next big release. You can take a look at the latest code if you want to play around with it.

Available from pre-release tag 2.07.00: http://svn.onehippo.org/repos/hippo/hippo-ecm/tags/Tag-HREPTWO-v2_07_00/.

Enjoy!

Arje

Hippo brings its products to the market under an open source license. We don't do this out of necessity, as the open source projects we use would allow us to distribute our software under a 'closed' license. Open source as a movement is very dear to us and we contribute on a regular basis to numerous projects, but our end products are open source for another reason.

Our products are distributed under open source license *because* (not despite) we are a commercial company. We believe that an attractive OS license encourages a level of adoption and collaboration that would be difficult or impossible to accomplish with a closed source product. It helps us create a larger ecosystem around our software than would otherwise be possible.

Distribution under an open source license changes the traditional user-vendor relationship in many ways. Most importantly it allows companies to implement and use the software without dealing directly with the original creator and thereby does away with vendor lock-in in an elegant way. Because of this liberal system of distribution, it is of essential importance that end-users have other ways to establish the origin of the code. Proper disclosure of origin is important for legal reasons, as unlabeled code could potentially be unlicensed, as well as for commercial reasons, as support or maintenance may be needed beyond what the distributor can provide. But even more importantly, disclosure helps ensure that any user can get in touch with the original developers to check for updates and participate in the community.

In the end, more than providing an ego boost to the developers, retaining a proper notice is an essential ingredient for a thriving eco-system. It is for these reasons that the Apache license, while being one of the most liberal, is so keen on giving credit to the original developers: retention of the original notices in any distribution is pretty much the only condition to be met for redistribution **.

So when three years ago a little startup from New Jersey started using the products we were working on at Hippo (Apache Jetspeed, Hippo CMS), we welcomed the expansion of our community. I've always felt that adoption of our software by other vendors was a testament to our success and in many ways a big compliment. Excited about the opportunity to get them on board, I visited their offices two years ago, and shared Hippo's plans for the future.

Now, three years down the road, while they do ask a lot of questions on the mailing lists, I am not aware of any contributions that they return. So, when I learned from CMSWire that "Good Samaritans that they are, Bluenog plans to contribute back the enhancements it made to various open source projects during the development phase of Bluenog ICE 4.5.", I was skeptical.

As anyone can tell from what is publicly available, their product very much remains a collection of open source tools, of which older versions of Apache Jetspeed and Hippo CMS form the backbone. Both are already provided as an integrated whole by Hippo, so what exactly is new here? If they have great contributions to make, why did we not see them yet? And as Bluenog's source code is not publicly available, there is currently no way of returning those contributions to the other users of Hippo CMS, Apache Jetspeed or any of the other open source projects they shrink wrap.

Already a bit wary of this self proclamation of good open source citizenship, I was shocked to see that they did not take their obligations under the Apache license too seriously. Distributing our product without retaining the required notices does not only go against the spirit of the open source community, it also hampers our efforts to build the larger community of which Bluenog and its customers are a part.

It's too easy to brush aside a breach of the Apache License as the weeping of another sad open source developer complaining about others stealing his code. Let's not forget that in the end respecting licenses is an essential part of the open source ecosystem. Opinions and discussions aside, Bluenog has simply been in breach with our license for years. Shrugging that off as a minor mistake is like a failing bank telling you: "what are you complaining about? It's only money".

Don't get me wrong: I think it is a great development that companies care to be good citizens of the open source community, but like any commercial open source vendor they should earn their bragging rights and above all stay within legal boundaries.

** disclaimer: apart from being CTO of Hippo, I'm also a member of the Apache Software Foundation. The statements I make about the Apache license are my entirely own, and are not related to my role at the Foundation, nor are they statements of the Foundation itself.

Join us for a third year of Apache Meetups! Users, committers, managers and developers will come together on the evenings of Monday 23rd and Tuesday 24th of March.

Registration is free of charge, and everyone is invited.

Monday 23rd (BarCamp during the day)

• 19:00 - 22:00 Maven Meetup
• 19:00 - 22:00 Portals Meetup

Tuesday 24th

• 19:00 - 22:00 Wicket Meetup
• 19:00 - 22:00 Jackrabbit Meetup
• 19:00 - 22:00 Lucene Meetup

If you're interested in any of these highly anticipated open source projects, come join us for an evening of presentations and discussion with the creators and committers working on the projects themselves.

Hosted by and located at the ApacheCon, these five special community meetings are taking taking place on the days before the ApacheCon conference in Amsterdam.

Entrance is FREE for everyone, so sign up quick!

Location

Sign up

What is a Meetup?

• Focused on a single Apache project
• Organized by the members of the project community itself
• Open agenda, anyone can propose a talk, covering a wide range of subjects related to the core project
• An opportunity for users, interested people and committers to get together

ApacheCon is the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), drawing ASF Members, innovators, developers, vendors, and users to experience the future of Open Source development. Drawing internationally-renowned thought-leaders, contributors, influencers, and organizations in the Open Source community, ApacheCon offers insight into the culture and community that develops and shepherds industry-leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server—the world’s most popular Web server software for ten years running.

Although he credits me for the video, I was merely playing the annoying voice-over and shaky-cam-operator role :-). Arthur does all the talking. So here's credit back, 'Thuur.

In his blog, he explains how we had to tweak the Wicket markup ids to get Selenium to work.

"Use case testing" is my term for what Arthur (and with him probably the rest of the world) calls "integration testing". This is where we bring together two very important stakeholders into our development project: on one hand, the developers want to know whether integration doesn't break functionality, and on the other hand, users and testers want to know whether the new version of the system has at least the same level of functionality and stability as the last time they tested it. That's why, at the end of each development Sprint, we have a round of user testing. During that phase we record the use cases that the testers perform and add that to our set of automated Selenium tests.

Go ahead and enjoy Arthur's blog and the demonstration video (and my shaky camera moves).