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Combining .NET and Java in an enterprise web publishing platform (Javazone 2014)
- 1. + Combining .NET and Java in an enterprise web publishing platform Svein-Magnus Sørensen @SveinMagnus
- 2. managing content is not the same as publishing content
- 3. most developers know that tight coupling is a bad thing
- 4. but why are many web content management systems so tightly coupled then?
- 5. introducing a decoupled publishing architecture
- 6. Content Management Content Publishing MS SQL Cluster Broker DB Unix Servers Windows IIS Server Tridion Content Manager Tridion CMS DB MS SQL Server Tridion Broker DB Firewall Cache Channel Service (Java) Java Web Application (Weblogic) End User Dynamic Content Rendered Content Update Notification Other data source Content Distributer (Tomcat) File storage Templates & binaries
- 7. advantages of decoupled content management choice of technology platforms less delivery overhead more scalable architecture increased security better reliability and uptime multiple content sources
- 8. coupling is not a binary state Tight Loose Personal publishing systems .NET based content management systems Java based content management systems Enterprise experience management platforms Wordpress Drupal Django EPiServer SiteCore eZ Publish Movable Type SDL Tridion Adobe EM Oracle WC HP Teamsite Umbraco Escenic Hippo CMS Magnolia
- 9. How loosely coupled should your systems be?
- 10. thank you Any questions? @SveinMagnus
Editor's Notes
- The core feature of a web content management system is as the name implies to manage web content, which sounds quite simple. However commercial publishing involves multiple stakeholders and complex processes, so the systems have over time grown to support a large part of this publishing workflow. With improvements to the World Wide Web and the rise of dynamic content, many content management systems also took on the role of publishing content since this was an easy way to enable the new dynamic features. This meant that many content management systems became tightly coupled with the neccesary publishing systems, which have had huge effects on many parts of the publishing systems software architecture. For more on this see; Decoupled Content Management 101: http://gadgetopia.com/post/7206 We need more loosely-coupled WCM offerings: http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2599-We-need-more-loosely-coupled-WCM-offerings
- Tight coupling is generally considered a bad thing and is a negative metric for software quality due to the detrimental effects it can have. This is also true for Content Management Systems, and many issues can be avoided and advantages gained with a loosely coupled architecture.
- So why are managing and publishing in web content management systems so often tightly coupled? The differences between platforms often have a big influence on systems, but generally there exist several both small and large publishing systems for any technology platform you can mention. This shows that differences in the technologies are not critically important, and any platform should be able to support decoupled architectures! Perhaps many CMS developers just are so used to the tight coupling that doing things differently haven’t occurred to them yet?
- The uncoupling of content management from content presentation provides a host of advantages to commercial and enterprise level systems. One of the most visible are the selection of separate technology platforms for each task, which can enable the creation of more stable, secure, efficient and scalable architectures for content presentation.
- Example architecture from a major Norwegian web property combining .NET and Java using the loosely coupled SDL Tridion CMS. Part of the background for building this architecture was that the company had a large team of Java developers on staff, and didn’t want to incur the cost of retraining or replacing them. At the same time the .NET based Tridion Content Manager was considered much easier to learn and use for the editorial staff, and would reduce training costs for them. Because of these conflicting requirements the decoupling between content management and content publishing was a large contributing factor in the selectioni of SDL Tridion.
- While the tightly coupled vs loosely coupled dichtomy might lead you to believe a system is either one or the other, there is actually a continuum between the two. The degree to which systems are coupled appear to be connected to both the target audience and the underlying technology platform of the systems. Nearly all personal publishing systems are very tightly coupled, especially the PHP-based ones which are almost exclusively used in a single server setup, such as Wordpress. A partial exception is the Perl based Movable Type when used in static publishing mode. When looking at mid-tier commercial offerings most .NET systems are tightly coupled, with for instance EPiServer being more so than Escenic which at least seperates management and publishing runtimes. Java systems on the other hand often have a somewhat loosely coupled architecture, but even the commercial offerings rarely go all the way. Hippo CMS and Magnolia are among the few that can run in fully decoupled mode. Among high end enterprise solutions however, most systems are loosely coupled regardless of technology. This includes offerings such as SDL Tridion, Oracle WebCenter, Adobe Experience Manager and HP Teamsite.