JBoss gets Nuked
Nukes on JBoss is a Java-based version of the 'Nuke' family of open-source content management systems originally written in PHP. Release Candidate 1 has been available for download since December, and the final release date has now been set for 18 February.
JBoss Group began the project after trying to implement PostNuke for its Web site, but found the PHP-based application did not scale well enough. After analysing the PHP codebase, said the company, they found what they called "dubious" ways of caching data and decided to port the framework to JBoss.
Nukes on JBoss authors Marc Fleury and Julien Viet were damning about some aspects of the PHP-based predecessor in an article they wrote last year, despite acknowledging in the same article the amazing feat that the programmers of PostNuke have accomplished. "It appeared that for the security components (highly developed in PostNuke), the engine went back to the database every time. Clearly this was a scalability mistake, as it means that every Web request goes to the database and does a query. We understand what the PHP LAMP crowd means when they say 'database-driven applications'." LAMP refers to applications that use the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language.
Aside from problems with scalability, the JBoss developers decided they needed a Java solution, and said they could find no existing open-source Java content management systems.
"Among the open-source solutions currently available, Java or otherwise, we were unable to find a single product that met our functional and performance needs," said Sacha Labourey, general manager of JBoss Group Europe. The company's Web site now runs on the ported Nukes.
JBoss says the fact that Nukes runs on its application server means that Enterprise Java Beans can be used to cache data more effectively than is done in the original PHP implementation, resulting in a 20-fold performance increase. The JBoss implementation also enables remote Flash invocations, which means Web site developers can create interactions between Flash and Nukes components.