About OpenWGA 5.5
OpenWGA 5.4 is about 2 and a half months old, so it's about time we talk about the next feature release that is coming up.
Unfortunately - at least for OpenWGA development - we had our share of busy times across the last months so we weren't able to progress in features as fast as we would have wanted to. Because of this we will have to break our usual 3-months-schedule for feature releases this time and add an extra month. We therefor plan to release OpenWGA 5.5 in the first days of December 2011.
However, we again have some very exciting things cooking for this release. So let's have a sneak peak at them.
Support for Microsoft SQL Server in Community Edition
We learned from your feedback that the Microsoft SQL Server is not only a strong player on the RDBMS market generally (which we already knew, actually :-) but also has a strong standing in (otherwise) open source based installations for smaller systems.
For us this means that placing support for it into the OpenWGA Enterprise Edition was not correct, as this really should only contain features which mainly are used by (larger) enterprises. So without much ado we will simply repackage it to be contained in the free Community Edition with 5.5. That's it.
New app development framework: HDBModel
Besides being a Web Content Management System for traditional
websites OpenWGA also has been excessively used as platform for
content-driven web applications. One example is the issue tracker application which we use to plan our development tasks.
The tracker was built upon a new backend architecture for these kind of apps called HDBModel, a pragmatic framework to develop data-driven web apps on the basis
of a simple hierarchical document database. After a successful 1-Year-Testdrive with the tracker application, where we were able to improve and streamline the concept, we are now finally making HDBModel an official feature with 5.5
HDBModel builds upon the already
known HDB-API (german documentation) from earlier WGA versions but takes it to the next level. It mainly adds a declarative model definition on top of it, where you plan the structure of your data hierarchy as a first step of creating a new application.
The effect of this approach is: The user interface that you will build after defining your data structure, to let your users manage data, will in most cases work without any custom TMLScript code. This is because the HDBModel framework knows exactly what to do to perform the neccessary operations from the model definition and the given context. You just need to tell it when to create/update/delete documents and it takes care of the details.
Matching HDBModel enablement functionalities in the WebTML language complete a framework which should allow you to rapidly develop data apps for the web, just like you could back then with the software of that certain yellow company brand...
On to the next page...
Carlos Santos 5:15:54 PM CET
I have great hopes towards yours Basic Website Kit. I hope that it will help beginners like me building simple web sites more quickly. I find OpenWGA powerful and promising, but lacking tutorials and documentation more tailored to beginners. We have to be able to do something with OpenWGA more easily. After that, ok, I realize I'll have to work harder in order to get more from it. Congratulations for your work.
Oliver 12:11:11 PM CET
Hi Carlos,
Thanks for your interest! This is exactly the area where we want to improve over the coming releases. We are very committed to the task of keeping you from "working harder" before you had some viewable and usable results with the platform.
Meanwhile we would be happy to help you out with the hurdles you encounter in our forum. Your feedback there is a valuable resource for us to find the areas of documentation and general user guidance where we need improvement.