How to extend Nukes

[rebornspirit]

Hi,

I'm trying to find some information, or just the api, on how to extend the Nukes framework. Anyone out there who have developed their own framework or so on top of Nukes?

One of the thing I'm trying to do is to implement strnuts in my custom modules, anyone who has experinece with that?

Last question, can anyone tell me what packages of the source are needed to recompile only the core of nukes? What depends on what ...

Grtz

[sgwood]

"rebornspirit" wrote:

I'm trying to find some information, or just the api, on how to extend the Nukes framework. Anyone out there who have developed their own framework or so on top of Nukes?

Check out how the existing modules and themes are done. What are you looking for over and above what Nukes provides now?

"rebornspirit" wrote:

One of the thing I'm trying to do is to implement strnuts in my custom modules, anyone who has experinece with that?

This is hard at the moment. There is some work going on to allow easy inclusion of JSPs and custom servlets into the Nukes environment, but this has not been finished.

"rebornspirit" wrote:

Last question, can anyone tell me what packages of the source are needed to recompile only the core of nukes? What depends on what ...

common and nukes are the core packages. The other modules do not rely on each other.


Sherman

[rebornspirit]

Thx for the reply,

So what I realy need is tthe ability to include struts / tiles or velocity or alleast something better than the Html page generator that exists within Nukes ;)

So I guess I'll better wait until the next release before promoting the use of Nukes for some of our projects. At first sight is just doesn't offers any extra's, even the lack of JAAS implementation or the use of EJB's (???) instead of something much easier then Hibernate realy amazes me ...

Grtz

[jae77]

what's wrong w/ the use of entity beans for the data persistence?

and keep in mind that right now julien is the only full time person devoted to this project - the rest of us are just contributors who have day jobs.

[sgwood]

You haven't told me what you are looking to get out of Nukes. It sounds like you are looking for the wrong thing.

The aim of this version is to get a JBoss based clone of the PHPNukes environment, with the capability of plugging in modules. It achieves that goal.

The HTML templating comes from PHPNukes. Folks have asked about JAAS, and someone is working on that. The EJB focus comes from what JBoss is, but I am using Hibernate under my application module - Nukes does not stop you doing that.

I find Nukes' lightweight approach (compared to JetSpeed and other portal servers) to be just right for what I want.


Sherman

[rebornspirit]

I'm not saying entitybeans are "wrong" per se, I only want to state that their are better alternatives, even alternatives that are promoted on the home page of this jboss site -> hibernate the most popular o/r mapping tool i.e. . And I don't think that saying that the application uses local I/F's makes the whole thing right. You don't have to attack me by saying that you guys have a day job and are just contributor, I was just trying to be open minded for a discussion.

First of all, this is the first time I'm looking at CMS solutions and I have to agree that my criticism on Nukes was a bit hard (especially because we are just in release 1). I took the time (my evening time because I also have a day job ;) ) to take a look at some of the other openSource CMS tools. For now I checked out: cofax, dbprism, lenya, magnolia, opencms and slide (redhat cms wouldn't download ppfff), and there are other waiting to be reviewed (If anyone knows any alternative, please inform me on that).

Beside looking for just a CMS, I'm looking for a CMS for which we can develop custom modules for our clients. SO actually making it a cms/portal. I was suprised to see that there is just nothing out there (opensource) that is usable. The Nukes concept of writing your won custom blocks / modules seems to be the biggest lack in all the other tools. So I have to agree with the JBoss group that they needed to rewrite PHPNukes because of the lack of Java opensource tools (and offcourse because phpnukes isn't scalable).

But no the less agreeing to the fact that for now Nukes is the best we have, I still have a lot of issues with this version (and yes I know it's still in release 1, so I'll be a little more patient). But I'm looking on how it is possible th build complete enterprise applications using Nukes.

For now, I always used Struts for my flow so I guess that with this kind of technology in the back of my head I having some problems about thinking in Nukes terms. So I look to hear from you guys some implementation examples on what you did with NUkes and how.

Because this Struts, tiles, jsp, xslt, ... using guy is for the moment a bit confused :D

But not the less I'm going to continue to monitor the progress on Nukes, and I guess it will kick ass in the next version ;)

Grtz

[rebornspirit]

Another remark,

Are there thoughts about changing the application to a server indepent project, are is the write one run anywhere philosofy gone for this project?

Grtz

[jae77]

there was no attack intended w/ the "day job" comment (my appologies if it was taken that way), it was more of just a "reminder".

now that nukes has hit the 1.0 release, ppl are coming out of the woodwork asking for features and why this and that isn't done, and they should realize that there is only one full-time person dedicated to this, w/ the rest of us helping when time permits (believe me, i'd love to work on this fulltime).

it's possible that someday hibernate will be used, but right now, cmp gets the job done, and quite well. as it was pointed out before, there is nothing that prevents you from using hibernate for a module that you write yourself.

there are plans for jsr-168, jaas support, and lots of other goodies, but those will take time and additional ppl to get rolled out (unless julien has been secretly hiding the fact that he's superman).

in answer to your other question, nukes will not be changed to jboss independent. it heavily leverages a lot of features and code of jboss.

[sgwood]

I'm not saying entitybeans are "wrong" per se, I only want to state that their are better alternatives, even alternatives that are promoted on the home page of this jboss site -> hibernate the most popular o/r mapping tool.

In my mind, given that Nukes is driven by JBoss, a J2EE server going for compliance, and the community around that, using anything other than CMP would be weird. Sure, Gavin (Msr. Hibernate) and at least some of his team are JBoss employees, but an official JBoss/Hibernate integration is not there yet.

... take a look at some of the other openSource CMS tools. For now I checked out: cofax, dbprism, lenya, magnolia, opencms and slide (redhat cms wouldn't download ppfff), and there are other waiting to be reviewed (If anyone knows any alternative, please inform me on that).

Beside looking for just a CMS, I'm looking for a CMS for which we can develop custom modules for our clients. SO actually making it a cms/portal.

Depending on what you are looking for, I think that a CMS is a separate thing than a portal.

CMSs are into content management workflow (create, edit, publish) and personalization (who can see what, when). OpenCMS and Redhat CMS are in that realm - BTW RedhatCMS costs $s. Slide is about WebDAV => version control.

On the portal end, you are looking at applications that plug into a spine that has role-based security. JBoss Nukes is here, as are PHPNukes and the Nukes clones, JetSpeed, Jahia, Gluecode, Liferay, Pluto and the wave of JSR 168 compliant products.

I switched from JetSpeed 1.4 to JBoss Nukes because JetSpeed was too heavy for me - too many irrelevant configuration options, hard to develop in, not very modular. Right now, JBoss Nukes is new, but I am happy with how it is progressing.



Sherman