Hello jspArt World!

[CMB]

Hello everybody,
This newsgroup will be dedicated to all discussions about my project
jspart that's currently hosted on google-code
http://code.google.com/p/jspart/ . I hope it'll spark useful
discussions and bring forth great ideas. jspArt is a small personal
project of mine that started 2-3 years ago while doing a project for an
exam entitled Web Applications. Although the artifact that became out
of it was primitive if I look at it today, it made me understand some
of the fundamentals of web applications and it became a passion. It
even featured a rudimentary MVC pattern that I wanted to codify as a
framework but something happened. About year and a half ago, I landed a
job in the field so I'm thankful that I also learned something more in
the mean time. In the project I've started using a real MVC framework
(struts 1) so I've abandoned the idea of developing my own. This
doesn't mean that jspArt will use struts 1, but I'm still unsure which
road to go with the UI framework. The initial commit features the model
behind the application, the DAO layer, and the first persistence layer
that we'll use is JPA (provider is hibernate), the build system is
maven2. All of these things are up to discussion. Not all DAO's are
functional but it shouldn't be too far from starting to work. For now
there is only one test that checks if inserting a user works. It would
be nice if we have a lot of tests. jspArt will not start with test
driven development but I acknowledge the usefulness of testing. I hope
I'll manage to provide a continuum server for continuous integration.
At the moment, I'm considering Struts2 and StrutsMVC as MVC frameworks,
or whether to take the JSF road. Seam does look tempting and it
features interesting stuff like jBPM that might prove very interesting.
The nice thing is that as all of these frameworks adopt a POJO style of
writing apps, we're not tied to any framework in particular and we can
postpone that decision until the model is stable and tested.
I have recently also valuated the JCR spec and I feel that although it
might be very applicable to the domain this app aims to cover, it
presents a whole new approach to the persistence model of the app. I
think it's possible that a middle ground is reached and perhaps we'll
soon see a hybrid approach where JPA is extended in order to make
programming a JCR repository almost equal to programming a JPA
application. In fact mapping a JCR repository to a JPA model makes
sense even to Patrick Linskey (OpenJPA) as it turned out when I've
asked about it on the jackrabbit mailing list
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.jackrabbit.user/1593 .
Jackrabbit is an implementation of the JCR spec and even if we don't
use it for persistence I might integrate it for file management on the
back end.
I plan to have the core in a small artifact, and everything else in
separate ones. This might allow us to have fun with various frameworks.
I hope to have an web view that will be optimized for mobile phones.
People will be able to license their work with some sort of creative
commons control and one day perhaps even we'll add a way to sell some
art. Every user will have an avatar. If it's not clear by now I intend
to create a deviantart.com clone in java. :)
I wanted to keep this short but perhaps putting some ideas on the table
from the start might make some of you interested. This is my hobby, I'm
not making any time commitments but I hope something useful will come
up soon and I look forward in getting to know as much people that might
help this project grow and have fun while learning something new.

Srgjan Srepfler