The Free Web Components
There are a number of basic components (that plug into the
Expresso framework) developer's can download and integrate into
their Web projects. A polling application and a forums (threaded
discussion) are both mature applications that can be plugged
into sites that use Expresso. Additionally a search engine
(which will utilize Apache Lucene is currently in beta.
Obviously these are not requisite site functionality, but being
free makes them appealing.
The Not-Free Expresso Components
The heavy hitting Web applications of today still remain in
content management and enterprise integration (including Web
Services and EJB development and integration). Jcorporate has
two offerings to fit these needs: Expresso Enterprise and
eContent.
Expresso Enterprise
The idea of Expresso Enterprise is to plug the base Expresso
framework into EJB servers, thus allowing for deployed and
scalable EJB components to work with Expresso-based
applications. At the core, Expresso Enterprise takes the
database objects that were created for the original Expresso
framework and deploys them as bean-managed entity beans.
Additionally, a Transaction package is included that utilizes a
session bean to handle transactions, a common need in enterprise
environments.
Expresso Enterprise also has its own components, though
currently there is only one: a Web Services component using Apache
Axis, which allows for Expresso components to be deployed as
Web Services.
This application was clearly not as well documented as the base
framework, and the price was unclear (I couldn't download it,
but it only listed the Web Services component for $799).
eContent
The content management solution seems to be the most evolved of
the Express components. This content management tool includes
all of the features (from what I could tell, though I wasn't
able to test it) one would expect from a CMS application: XML
integration, content security, simplified creation-editing-
publishing, work flow/collaboration, version tracking, and so
on. In short it seemed to be an enterprise-worthy tool. The cost
is lower than most CMS tools ($2,500/domain for compiled,
$9,999/domain for source). A comparison matrix online was
outdated, but showed that eContent is fairly competitive.
Like the base framework, this application seems to have evolved
and the documentation along with it. It is currently at version
2.2 and a number of sites were listed that use this plug-in to
handle their content. All of the sample sites seemed to function
and perform fairly well, while looking considerably different (I
have noticed other low-priced CMS tools tend to have a very
homogenous look/feel). All-in-all this seemed to be an
application worthy of analyzing.
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