Gentics Portal.Node: http://www.gentics.com

Log: http://herbert.poul.at/board/thread/609/?page=1

Since i basically work with it every day i'm a "bit" biased - but as i wrote on the WebappFrameworkComparison snip i want to compare the "best" way to do it in a framework .. not the way a newbie would do it.. so it shouldn't matter too much ..

1. Screenshots

• - bar object type (model)
• - Bar List
• - Show Bar (non logged in)
• - Edit Bar (logged in user)

2. Evaluation

In WebappFrameworkComparison/Planning i prepared a few questions, so i now try to answer them ...

How easy was the framework to learn ?

N/A - i already knew it. But considering the severe difference to most other frameworks it probably takes some effort to get used to it.

How easy was the setup ?

N/A - easy if you know how to use a setup.exe

How easy is the deployment of new versions ?

Well... package it into a deployable .war file, deploy it .. and if you are using tomcat you probably want to restart it (since iirc it has known memory leaks)

How extend able is the result ? (e.g. Imagine i would like to add a workflow where changes get online once an administrator approves them)

reasonable.. not perfect though. (it is sometimes hard to add new features without breaking existing code because of weak references and very context sensitive actions.)

How much duplication was necessary ? (e.g. need to describe the models in the database as well as in code or xml ? / need to describe attributes of models in models and views ?, etc.)

Not too much - although the object types (models) were configured with attributes and their type, which has to be repeated for the edit form (and the list).

How much useless code (code which is the same for every application, view, model, ...) was required

except the verbosity of XML .. nothing i know of.

URLs:

How does the mapping of URLs work ?

N/A - they are portal URLs.

How can you link within templates to other actions/views/... ?

N/A - views are changed by server side actions, not GET requests.

3. Various Comments

• You better like XML if you start implementing something - No code here, move along ..

4. Code Examples

Only view code was written. No templates were customized.

here are the two views:

• list.xml
• edit.xml

5. Conclusion

Gentics Portal.Node extremely benefits by the fact that this is a very simple CRUD application - so everything went very smooth and the result is stable and almost production ready (tweaking of the design is definitively necessary, but from a security, validation, escaping point of view it seems to be pretty stable already.)

It will get much more tricky once things outside of the scope of a normal CRUD application are added (imagine comments with ratings which should be aggregated during list view).