Open Source Services
My work environment is a very large distributed set of web applications. There is a large number of applications, and it seems that we continue to face the issue of rebuilding the wheel for common services. Many OSS web applications (CMS systems etc) may be suitable, but they all seem to fall victim to the “I am the center of the Universe” design philosophy. This is, “if you use me to build all your stuff, all will be fine”. However, this never happens. We have 3rd party wiki tools, 3rd party CRM. We have custom home grown legacy apps, Microsoft sharepoint. One group took Radiant CMS and installed it, then get a data feed from it to display “news” about their application.
Also, we are building a Menuing application at work that has hierarchical capability. Since many different apps (Some java, some .NET, some 3rd party) are all trying to appear to the end user as a single experience it would be nice to be able to update the shared menu items in one place and have the changes propagate.
The solutions today seems to be “use our app”: Sharepoint has menuing and in theory could offer a web service but that seems like overkill. Plone, the Portals, etc all seem to be focused on getting the applications built on top of their infrastructure.
So, I think the reverse, a set of services which are not intended to be “built on top of” but rather accessed through libraries. Think Amazon S3 services.
- CMS System: Admin to log in and edit, add articles and content (About us, policies, etc). Then the display would be shown within your web application by calling a library (over WS). This assumes you would have caching on your end.
- KB system. Knowledge base/help, again templated for your own system. It looks like your site, and is your site. But, having an admin to go login to and change the content, articles can be shared across sites. I know some of the commercial KB systems have web service API’s, so this would be similar.
- Menuing system. Ability to update navigation and it will update on multiple seperate applications.
