Bronco web site management system (was: Re: Hello)

[Markus Fleck <fleck informatik uni-bonn de>]

[Bronco Free Web Site Content Management System]
[http://www.ntlug.org/bronco/index.html]

Guillermo S. Romero / unnamed / Familia Romero wrote:
> >I've just signed onto the list.  I'm here to listen in for nuggets to help
> >with a project that i'm involved in to create a software package that will
> >provide an integrated environment for scripting that's languague neutral
> >(PERL, Tcl and Python are our three initial targets) with a persistant
> >storage for scripts, content, whatever.
[...]
> You should join other Gnome lists, IMO. Just to know how to make a compliant
> app, bugs reports, CORBA things...
> Maybe your app could become the Gnome Web Manager (if it meets the Gnome
> standards, like a free license and common GUI). Anybody wanting such thing
> for Gnome?

Hi!

I learned about your Bronco project from Tim Wodd's
post to the GNOME GUI mailing list. I am currently
working on a groupware tool - another clone of some
commercial software, actually, as this one is supposed
to offer something similar to "Lotus Notes" for the free
software world.

You might want to check out this project's web pages at

  <http://mediator.cs.uni-bonn.de/mediator/>.

For the "Mediator" project, I will try to combine core concepts of

 - Mnemonic (extensible, but somehow overly complex web browser)
 - COAS (Caldera's Linux administration tool / framework)
 - GNOME (The GNU integrated desktop)

I will do most of the development in the Python language,
as I have found this to be the most portable free language,
and the "Mediator" is also supposed to be ported to MS Windows
eventually. There will be an API later that will also allow
the use of other languages together with the Mediator
(such as C, Guile, Tcl or whatever, maybe even BASIC).

The philosophy between Bronco and Mediator is different in
that Mediator's priority is (currently) to reuse and "glue
together" existing free software, to be able to deliver a
stable system right from the beginning, while Bronco (and
COAS, for that matter) intend to build completely new,
self-contained frameworks. I would be glad to share some
synergies with the Bronco project - the Mediator project
could benefit from cooperation by gaining some additional
developer brainpower, and Bronco might benefit from this
by having a more flexible and interoperable client-server
infrastructure.

Please let me know what you think about cooperation
between the Mediator and the Bronco projects. I am
very open to issues of changing Mediator's design -
the currently favored architecture (using Apache,
IRC, Python and a bunch of small other tools) is
determined mainly by the need for something that
can be implemented by a single person in finite
time. The most serious problem with the current
architecture is probably that installation will
be hard work on the part of the system
administrator if she wants to install a
Mediator system complete from the sources.

I am also very much influenced by the Mnemonic
project's goal to "modularize everything", creating
a very small core and having an API that does runtime
on-demand loading of all the optional parts of the
system. Thus, in an ideal world, Mediator could be
used as either a "simple" web browser or a full-grown
groupware application with support for all kinds
of interpersonal communication and distributed
database access.

Please make sure that you direct any followups to
this mail to an appropriate subset of the mailing
lists to which this mail has been "crossposted".

Yours,
Markus.