Magnolia CMS to use Vaadin framework for version 5 development
The developers of the Java-based open source Magnolia CMS have announced their selection of the Java framework Vaadin to develop Magnolia 5. In a blog posting, Boris Kraft, CTO of Magnolia, said that with Magnolia 5 they aim to provide "the very best administration interface for Web-based content management on the market".
Vaadin is an open source web application framework for rich internet applications that features a server-side architecture, which means that the majority of the logic runs on the servers. Based around Ajax techniques, on the client-side Vaadin is built on top of, and can be extended with, the Google Web Toolkit. Kraft says that the server-side architecture could impact performance and it is an issue where development effort will have to be invested to achieve the desired responsiveness. However, he says the advantages of using a well documented, Java friendly framework, outweigh that possible disadvantage.
Magnolia 5 will feature a completely re-written user interface and a RESTful web-service API. The developers hope to "amaze content authors with a high-usability interface not just when using a desktop browser, but also on an iPad and other mobile devices with a touch screen".
The Vaadin developers said in their blog that "The guys at Magnolia have already done some excellent job with Magnolia 5 PoC (Proof of Concept) features: keyboard support, type-sensitive context menus, a configurable tree-grid and so on" and were confident Magnolia could achieve their goals.
According to the Magnolia 5 road map, although there are as yet no fixed release targets, the Magnolia developers are aiming to release Magnolia 5 no later than early summer 2011. The current version of the Magnolia CMS is version 4.4 available as a community edition under the GPLv3, or as a commercial Enterprise edition. Vaadin is licenced under an Apache 2.0 licence.
(trk)