[opencms-dev] opencms verse JBoss Portal Server?

[Christoph Schönfeld]

Hi Mick,

did you already decid to use OpenCms?

Adding content will be our customer's job. I just build the software 
they need based on OpenCms. I only use the XML content for which JSP 
templating is quite simple.

The start took me a while as well. Looking at the source code was and 
still is often necessary to because of lacking documentation. This is 
the biggest problem of OpenCms.

This way it takes some time to find out how things work. Though, up to 
now I did not find serious show stoppers and I wasn't forced to do ugly 
hacks or patch OpenCms. OpenCms uses interfaces at many places and it is 
possible to configure or override most of the default behaviour.

I had to sacrifice the idea of deploying the whole thing as a WAR file. 
I am very unhappy with the deployment model of OpenCms and the runtime 
model of the modules. It complicates development and testing. But I try 
to reduce container testing to an absolute minimum by writing code 
decoupled from OpenCms and test cases for it that run outside of the 
container.

A great thing is debugging OpenCms while it runs in the container. I do 
that in Eclipse. See http://opencms-wiki.org/Debugging. It's very easy 
to set up and works great.


Best regards,
Christoph