DLSLUG meeting 7 Sept 2006: Joomla and AJAX
Ted Roche
tedroche at comcast.net
Mon Sep 18 20:26:03 EDT 2006
The Dartmouth Lake Sunapee Linux User Group was fortunate enough to have
two great presentations at their September meeting. Sixteen people
attended the meeting.
Barrie North of Compass Design [1] and JoomlaShack [2] presented Joomla.
Barrie started off his presentation by apologizing in advance for not
being able to tackle deep technical problems, as we was primarily a web
designer (Go CSS!) and marketer, but not a technical geek. (In fact, I
think his vantage point worked well for the topic). Joomla is a spinoff
of the Mambo project with 5 - 10 million sites. A new release, v. 1.5,
is due out soon now, primarily an internal refactor into an OOPier
design, with better hooks and API design. The developer site [3] boasts
30,000 registered developers, 733 extensions.
Barrie proceded to give us a tour of a couple of sites, and jumped in
and out of admin mode to show how changes could be implemented easily
within the admin interface and immediately reflected on the site.
People looking for a content management system or any dynamic web site
should consider joomla.
The second presentation was by Jeff Dwyer. Jeff is a 2002 graduate of
Dartmouth's CS department and has worked a couple of interesting
computer jobs since. He's in the process of starting myhippocampus.com,
something of a freeform, mind-map personal database web site. Jeff has
taken some time to investigate several web foundations and frameworks to
pick the optimal ones for his development effort. He gave us an overview
of what AJAX is and how JavaScript on the back end communicates with the
server. Jeff's choice: the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which allows you to
develop an application in Java and GWT then translates it to JavaScript.
Some debugging still going to be required, of course, and Jeff had a
couple of recommendations for JavaScript debugging.
Thanks to Barrie and Jeff for great presentations and to Bill McGonigle
for running the meeting!
[1] www.compassdesigns.net
[2] www.joomlashack.com
[3] dev.joomla.com
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