DLSLUG meeting 7 Sept 2006: Joomla and AJAX

The Dartmouth Lake Sunapee Linux User Group was fortunate enough to have 
two great presentations at their September meeting. Sixteen people 
attended the meeting.

Barrie North of Compass Design [1] and JoomlaShack [2] presented Joomla. 
Barrie started off his presentation by apologizing in advance for not 
being able to tackle deep technical problems, as we was primarily a web 
designer (Go CSS!) and marketer, but not a technical geek. (In fact, I 
think his vantage point worked well for the topic). Joomla is a spinoff 
of the Mambo project with 5 - 10 million sites. A new release, v. 1.5, 
is due out soon now, primarily an internal refactor into an OOPier 
design, with better hooks and API design. The developer site [3] boasts 
30,000 registered developers, 733 extensions.

Barrie proceded to give us a tour of a couple of sites, and jumped in 
and out of admin mode to show how changes could be implemented easily 
within the admin interface and immediately reflected on the site.

People looking for a content management system or any dynamic web site 
should consider joomla.

The second presentation was by Jeff Dwyer. Jeff is a 2002 graduate of 
Dartmouth's CS department and has worked a couple of interesting 
computer jobs since. He's in the process of starting myhippocampus.com, 
something of a freeform, mind-map personal database web site. Jeff has 
taken some time to investigate several web foundations and frameworks to 
pick the optimal ones for his development effort. He gave us an overview 
of what AJAX is and how JavaScript on the back end communicates with the 
server. Jeff's choice: the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which allows you to 
develop an application in Java and GWT then translates it to JavaScript. 
Some debugging still going to be required, of course, and Jeff had a 
couple of recommendations for JavaScript debugging.

Thanks to Barrie and Jeff for great presentations and to Bill McGonigle 
for running the meeting!

[1] www.compassdesigns.net
[2] www.joomlashack.com
[3] dev.joomla.com