[opencms-dev] Anybody working on or interested in a "fat" client?

[Laurent Gauthier]

I have been studying OpenCMS for several hours and I am quite impressed with the overall package and system architecture.

It strikes me, however, that web content management in general and OpenCMS in particular can benefit from a fat client instead of a purely thin/browser based client. A thin client cannot be as smooth as a fat client with drag and drop, multiple open documents, a locally managed state and local but synchonized versions of resources.

An Open source and Java based platform such as Eclipse with its plug-in architecture could be used to build a very nice, portable and effective client for OpenCMS resource creation and site/project administration. Eclipse's plug-in update mechanism could be used to keep the client in sync with OpenCMS releases and I presume most of the existing OpenCMS services could be harnessed by the client application without too many modifications (if any) to the core OpenCMS back-end. Finally, Eclipse users could configure the system to use their favorite tool sets for HTML/JSP/XML/image editing and a lot of things could happen almost magically. I don't think the development of such a client would represent a tremendous effort (although not trivial by any measure) and would certainly make web content management more appealling to the masses if only because easier to do and closer to the way they are used to work.

My 2cents...

Laurent Gauthier
Mirasol Op'nWorks
www.opnworks.com



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