Aaron’s Potlatch

Over the last few years, our work experience as software engineers has changed pretty drastically, or at least where I work. More and more web services and application integration is taking place. Third party apps offer web service connectors, there are large numbers of technologies for doing integration from ESB/BPM/BPEL to ETL or Change Data Capture. As more and more corporate development and software development goes to Software As a Service (Salesforce.com, Amazon S3, Google Apps), Open Source in my opinion faces a challenge of remaining relevant. WordPress.com doing a combination model of open source software and then a hosted version of it is an example of the struggle ahead.The traditional choices of software look like this (gross approximation but it works).

Diagram 1: Software development stack options of in house development with Open Source libraries, or Open Source framework with customizations.

You seemed to have a choice in doing software development to choose a series of libraries or a framework Libraries: Hibernate, Jboss, Struts in the Java world, Ruby on Rails, Typo etc in the Ruby world, or, Django, Zope, Plone in python Frameworks: Joomla and a large number of PHP apps, or even Sharepoint in the non OSS MS world. However, I think if other people’s experience are like mine, trying to get a “CMS” framework to fit into your needs was difficult. Most Frameworks, Portals, and CMS sytems fall into a trap of trying to be a better mouse trap and asking “if only you use my system, it will be good”. CMS, Portal, or App frameworks talk about “Plug-in” architecture, but still this forces you to a generally cumbersome development paradigm compared to building your app from library components.

At my workplace, our applications were custom software development applications, but it would have been nice to have the built in general navigation/menuing, page management, content management of the CMS frameworks to show messages within the application. However, to build on top of the CMS framework was much more cumbersome for doing software development.

So, DemiSauce is software that is only “half of a software stack” (Hence the name: Demi for half, Sauce for Software As a Service SaaS). It is not meant to be a stand alone web application. It is meant to be able to provide web services to your custom software applications giving them ability to get and display “content” such as “news”. It is meant or assumed to also have a cache system between the application, and DemiSauce servers as well. This allows content and services to be shared across multiple custom software applications.

The Services that are currently being kicked around are:

• Content Management:
  • GetListOfContent for a context (page/area of site)
  • Knowledge base, or help system authoring
• Feedback tools: “Submit feedback here…”
  • “Rate this page or app”

DemiSauce is a Pylons Web Application built with SqlAlchemy and mako templates.