[TYPO3-dev] TYPO3 JSR-168/JSR-170 compliance w/ Jetspeed, Graffito and all that comes with it!

[David Toshack]

Hi Everyone,

I came across a post on the wiki[1],
regarding Rails which sparked some interest in a cross language
implementation that has been in the back of my mind for quite some time.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the projects being
developed at Apache Portals [2], but originally part of the Apache
Jakarta Project, it has been in existance for ~10 years. Since the word
"portal" was used to represent a web application, Jetspeed[3] has
argueably been THE standard in portal frameworks.

As TYPO3 5.0 will be leaning towards JSR-168 compliance, and hopefully
JSR-170 compliance, Jetspeed2 and Graffito would be a great way to
achive this with a brand spanking new TYPO3 interface. Graffito is a CMS
Framework[4] currently undergoing incubation at the home of Apache.

In this perfect world TYPO3 could use any number of languages or 
frameworks (including Struts, PHP, Python, Ruby, w/on Rails ... etc) for 
portlet development, and have access to thousands of portlets available 
that would simply "plugin", excuse the pun! In effect TYPO3 would 
basically become a series of PSML (XML based - Portal Structure Markup 
Language[5]) configurations. These concepts have been put together over 
the last 10 or so years by the best heads in the business and have 
turned the fellow heads of developers involved in some huge corporate 
scale open source projects, like ofbiz[6], WfMOpen[7], IBM's 
WebSphere[8] and many more.

I believe The TYPO3 Association is bigger than the software it has
created, and going by the TYPO3 community's reputation, this approach
would no doubt become THE standard in portal implementations. But the
question: Is this the right place for the job? I don't know, it would
mean a huge leap and learning curve for most core developers with
knowledge only in PHP.

Ambitous I know. Some of you are probably thinking bbbfffttthhh to Java,
more like TYPO3 10.0, but it is only software; you could imagine it right?

Please keep in mind this post was written for nothing more than food for
thought and has been a vision of mine with Jetspeed for about 7 or 8
years now. I just hope you all enjoy munching on my idea!

[1]
http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Extension_coordination_team#Projects_Searching_for_a_Team 


[2] http://portals.apache.org
[3] http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2
[4] http://incubator.apache.org/graffito
[5] http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-1/psml.html
[6] http://ofbiz.org
[7] http://wfmopen.sf.net
[8] http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere


Cheers,
David