[drupal-docs] Drupal in the Java world

[Mark Leicester]

Hello Liza,

It's my fault for making such an offhand remark. The 'challenge' I 
refer to is probably quite specific to the application of Drupal to the 
Apache Cocoon community. Naturally, there are some in the Apache Cocoon 
community who would rather we "ate our own dog food". The equivalent 
would be if I were to build drupal.org using something written in Perl 
(or more likely, Ruby on Rails). The difference however, is that Cocoon 
is a very powerful XML web application framework with *potential* for 
use as the basis of a community tool, whereas Drupal *is* such a tool. 
Some Cocoon applications are close (esp. Daisy[1]), but I chose to go 
with Drupal, rather than to build or extend an existing Cocoon-based 
tool.

Now to your question about folksonomy. The Cocoon community has an 
official static site[2], a wiki[3], and mailing lists. I felt that 
material discussed on the mailing lists can remain useful long after a 
thread ceases to be active. Some of this material may be converted into 
wiki documents, perhaps eventually ending up in the official 
documentation. I find the mailing list archives[4] difficult to mine 
for information. It struck me that applying folksonomy to the mailing 
list was a low cost, low energy, collaborative way of filing 
information stored there. At the same time it made sense to let people 
tag the rest of the content in the site too. To get the job done 
quickly I used autowitch's awTags[5] modules. I'm watching the free 
tagging implementation develop with interest; coupled with a sprinkling 
of Ajax I'm sure it'll be a killer.

Ah yes, while I'm at it, a realisation I've had re. folksonomy is that 
the keywords people choose to tag content with are likely the same 
keywords they will type into Google. I've been monitoring Google 
referrals, and then tagging content according to what people have 
entered. For example, if I notice someone has arrived at our site via 
the search term "cocoon databases", I will run off and tag all content 
related to databases (found via internal search perhaps) with the word 
"databases". The awTags module gives me a page titled "databases | 
Planet Cocoon", filled with content that mentions databases. A nice way 
to indirectly give people what they want, and it seems to be good for 
Google ranking...

Hope this answers your questions,
Mark

[1] http://www.cocoondev.org/daisy/
[2] http://cocoon.apache.org
[3] http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/
[4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev
[5] http://www.autowitch.org/node/4323

On 31 May 2005, at 14:48, Liza Sabater wrote:

> Hi Mark and Dries,
>
> Mark, first question : Folksonmy at PlanetCocoon. What are you using
> for that? Is there actual folksonomy implementation for all nodes?
> Please, pray tell.
>
> Dries : Why would introducing a PHP-baed CMS to the Java community be
> an interesting political challenge? Please pray tell.
>
> My husband, Mark Napier [ www.potatoland.org ], is one of a handful of
> net and software artists using Java. He and I are collaborating on a
> new piece and are seriously considering Drupal for deploying and
> managing the "artware".
>
> That comment definitely piqued my interest.
>
> Best,
> liza
>
>
> On May 31 2005, at 05:18, Mark Leicester wrote:
>
>> Hi there Dries,
>>
>> Thanks for your kind comments, and also for the heads-up on the Drupal
>> ad mention. Introducing a PHP-based CMS into a Java community is an
>> interesting political challenge, but the power of the tool itself is
>> very compelling. So far, so good. Thanks to everyone for all their 
>> hard
>> work in making Drupal the nice piece of kit that it is!
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Mark
>>
>>
>> On 31 May 2005, at 09:50, Dries Buytaert wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 31 May 2005, at 10:11, Mark Leicester wrote:
>>>> I haven't seen reference on Drupal.org to this yet, so, FWIW Drupal
>>>> powers two reasonably high profile Java community sites:
>>>> http://www.springframework.org/ (I don't know who built this - for
>>>> Spring)
>>>> http://www.planetcocoon.com/ (I built this - for Apache's Cocoon
>>>> project)
>>>
>>> I've been reading PlanetCocoon lately -- it's both an interesting and
>>> beautiful site.  Great work.
>>>
>>> PlanetCocoon also got mentioned on the Drupal ad: see Drupal.org main
>>> page for detais.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> [ drupal-docs | http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-docs ]
>>>
>>
>> -- 
>> [ drupal-docs | http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-docs ]
>>
>>
> Liza Sabater
> Blog Publisher
> www.culturekitchen.com
>
> AIM - cultkitdiva
> SKYPE - lizasabater
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> [ drupal-docs | http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-docs ]
>