Java CMS Systems
Michael Levin is at the JavaPosse Roundup this week. Today, they're discussing Java CMS Systems. I recently had an e-mail discussion with a reader regarding Java-based CMS Systems. In hopes of getting these questions answered by Michael today, here's that thread:
Original E-Mail:
OpenCMS, Magnolia CE/EE, Atleap, Alfresco, Liferay.
Magnolia EE, Day Communique, Hannon Hill, Refresh, Vertical Site.
We are leaning towards Magnolia EE since we have a load balancer and two production server, but I bet we could hack in support in the community edition.
Any comments/recommendations?
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My response:
I'd check out Alfresco's new 2.0 WCM - just released last week. I haven't looked at many of the CMSes in a year or so, but I'm willing
to bet that OpenCMS still has issues installing. I still like Drupal too and recommend it for folks just wanting a website they can edit.
In reality, my experience with CMS systems is outdated and you shouldn't consider me an authority. 
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Thanks for the lead. We actually eliminated Alfresco, b/c I thought they were more of a portal.
The reason we were leaning towards Magnolia and Vertical Site was b/c of JSR 170 (which Alfesco claims to support).
I wonder about the scalability of JCR, do have an opinion?
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I don't have an opinion because I don't have much experience with it. It's supposed to be the JDBC of CMSs, so I imagine it's pretty scalable. However, it's pretty new, so I'm sure there will be growing pains. I know that Infoq.com uses Magnolia as their backend (and WebWork as their frontend), so obviously it scales well for them.
What are your thoughts on Java-based CMS Systems? Comments from experienced developers appreciated more than vendor pitches.
Posted by Anonymous coward on March 08, 2007 at 05:49 PM MST #
Posted by Kief on March 08, 2007 at 06:59 PM MST #
Posted by Michael Levin on March 08, 2007 at 08:04 PM MST #
Posted by joe on March 08, 2007 at 11:22 PM MST #
I believe that the Alfresco portlet is jsr168 compliant so therefore can be deployed into any 168 portal. I started out using the portlet but soon realized that I was better off simply deploying the Alfresco war into tomcat or Jboss and then pointing all of my content consumers at it, letting it handle content for all of my liferay portals. I strongly recommend taking this approach instead of deploying as a portlet. When it was deployed as a portlet, i had one afresco for each liferay instance. This meant an alfresco db for each, an alfresco filesystem for each and keeping track of each. It was a pain in the *&&. With the setup I have now, i just put Alfresco on a nice powerful machine, create a space for each consumer, create content and point my consumers (liferay portlets right now) to it. It's really much more simple now. The workflows in Alfresco are very nice also. The alfresco site has some decent screencasts to demo it.
Currently I'm using alfresco 1.4 with liferay 4.2.1.
Both liferay and alfresco are implemented in spring/hibernate
liferay uses struts I believe
alfresco uses myfaces
both come with a hypersonic db so everything works immediately.
They are both very cool.
Posted by rick marry on March 09, 2007 at 01:47 AM MST #
What do you need to scale? Number of authors? Amount of Content? Requests served? DIfferent questions, different ways of doing it.
There are many ways to scale (Magnolia) - one thing is the built-in subscriber mechanism, so its straightforward to have lets say a HW load balancer and two (or more) public facing machines to handle the requests. You can write a custom Apache (or other) cache module (has been done before) or write a custom cache handler (cache is pluggable in Magnolia) if what exists with respect to caching is not meeting your requirements. You can cluster the repository (with the upcoming Magnolia & Jackrabbit 1.2).
You can use Akamai for caching (has been done for France24.com, a massive global news website). This site, powered by Magnolia, has content in English, French and Arabic, movies, audio, text, images, is updated simultaneously with the TV channels and has handled 50000 (fifty thousand) simultaneous requests when launched.
Last week we launched lastminute.com.au, the leading travel site in Australia, with booking integration, white-labeling of content, partial content delivery and other extravaganza. Their requirements are also pretty high regarding performance and scalability (they expect to grow).
(For partial content try this: http://lastminute.com.au/home.html
http://lastminute.com.au/home.footer.html
http://lastminute.com.au/home.header.html
http://lastminute.com.au/home.content.html
Using selectors we deliver parts of the page, so that it can easily be reused elsewhere. )
In addition, we do have a portlet bridge in the EE that runs nicely with Liferay, in fact we currently do a joint project for a car manufacturer. It works very well, and scales the same way it would with standalone Magnolia, since the same mechanisms are used (each Liferay instance contains a Magnolia subscriber that handles the content).
Magnolia is now in its forth year of development, its pretty mature and we have a lot of experience with what works, how, when and why - or not. If you have questions, feel free to download our Magnolia Enterprise Edition and make use of our free evaluation services to help you get the most out of your time spent on evaluation. (Details come with the download).
Of course, you can also contact me directly at any time.
Posted by Boris Kraft on March 09, 2007 at 07:59 AM MST #
We spent ages looking for a CMS that could be integrated into an existing big website, and didn't find anything. They all lack useful (or documented) APIs that allow for *our* way of doing stuff, instead of *their* way. Their way is probably better, but we can't re-write our entire system just to fit some CMS. Neither can we re-write half of a 3rd-party CMS to adapt it.
(Yeah, there's a lot of talk about "integration", but that's mostly just about connecting to databases etc.)
We're hoping for more scalable future versions of Apache JackRabbit's JCR, to build something on top of that.
However, if you're building a new site, Magnolia looks kind of nice.
Posted by Anders Bengtsson on March 09, 2007 at 10:10 AM MST #
After reading through some of these posts, I decided that I wanted to try Magnolia. I specifically wanted to try the EE version because I want to check out the portlet bridge. I followed the procedure which was to email magnolia and fill out some personal info... that was 5 hours ago. I have gotten no reply and I don't have the trial.
weak...very weak
Posted by rick marry on March 09, 2007 at 09:49 PM MST #
Posted by 70.221.101.223 on March 14, 2007 at 02:17 AM MDT #
Posted by cedar on March 15, 2007 at 02:13 AM MDT #
Posted by Ken Yee on August 26, 2008 at 01:17 AM MDT #
hello we are developing a new wcm and cms gwt based on jooMla but with java power it is going to be as easy as joomla and you can checo fue core in source forge fue name of the project is melenti
Bye Adrian
Posted by Adrian cadena on September 22, 2008 at 03:10 PM MDT #
My Current annoyance with Java based CMS's is that they are often created for a specific niche market. Or do have a very limited set of features.
Like what ken yee mentioned that a current CMS should have a very easy to start a website, take your OWN template and hang it into a CMS very easily.
Currently there is not java CMS that allows you to simply create a website fast.
Ries
Posted by Ries on February 11, 2009 at 11:38 PM MST #
The greatest failure of java is that none of completed CMS build on top of it. But Nuxeo looks promising. It is used SEAM Framework.
Andriyana Tresnawan
ComLabs AKA
Posted by Andriyana Tresnawan on November 02, 2010 at 02:13 AM MDT #