On digital experiences, Open Source, startups & our digital future
With the help of Cognisync, Sun Microsystems converted Java.net, the website of the Java community, to Drupal. The previous version of java.net, was custom built by O'Reilly Media. Interesting choice for a site devoted to Java, but needless to say, a great testimonial to Drupal.
This can only be summarized to the following:
Drupal FTW!
Great! They made Drupal look like a Windows 95 application. : P
Other than that, sweet news. ; )
fantastic point! v1 was a swap out. Hopefully v2 we get to bring in a graphic designer :)
I have no doubt you'll dress it up. I was just being a little snarky. : D
My brother's a Java dev and occasional Drupal dabbler. I'll be sure to point this one out.
To save face they could claim that their PHP runs under Quercus or some other similar PHP Java implementation.
Does it really?
I am one of the java.net bloggers and was happy to see them adopt Drupal. It's a big improvement over the older horrid MovableType installation. Java.net has long had non-java apps running it's infrastructure such as wiki.java.net being implemented with Twiki. But I digress. It's plausible that Drupal is running under Caucho's appengine which compiles PHP files to JSP, or using Quercus on the glassfish appengine, both approaches have performance similar to or superior to straight PHP.
In any case there's a weird integration of Drupal into the java.net chrome. The page isn't directly rendered from Drupal but somehow they take the output from Drupal and merge it into java.net for display.
I can say the bloggers alias has been alive with problems - it's always to be expected with a major transition like this that there will be stumbles and the need to learn new ways of doing something. But there some actual issues. I want to share one of them to bring light in the Drupal community as to the need to change this things.
For example some of the bloggers are wanting to install their own sidebar widgets. But Drupal's permissions system doesn't let people add their own blocks, it's an administrator thing instead. I dunno if there's been a solution developed. In any case there are lots of blogging systems that allow each blogger to install their own sidebar widgets. e.g. you can go to blogger.com or wordpress.com, set up a free account, and go to town defining your own sidebar stuff. Drupal should provide a similar user experience to bloggers but as I said installing a block is an administrator event and by default is site-wide.
Sorry to debunk the Quercus theory, but it's not using a java engine. The display was a custom theme that we ripped off the old site and created a custom drupal theme out of. This is definitely on a priority list for the next version.
The bloggers on the site have definitely had a few things to say about it, and we are trying hard to get all their issues resolved. Most of them have been caused by a change in system, which is obvious. Nothing too brutal.
We are going to be rolling some custom sidebar features for the bloggers soon, as that is a highly requested feature. Something where they have a node with some fields that get populated into the sidebars on certain pages, or something like that.
You give the Web site project to a Java fanatic.
"Hey, this content management system is not written in Java. Lets write a CMS in Java."
"Apache is not written in Java? Put the CMS aside while we write the Web server in Java."
"Linux not Java? Hold that Web server project!"
"What! The microcode in the CPU is no Java! Give me some silicon. We gonna ..."
Yeah, Drupal is quicker.
Usually when I write lol, I'm actually not laughing, but this time I actually was
It's interesting to see that they're using the Drupal core search instead of one of the many valid alternatives such as Sphinx or Solr.
Actually, right now we aren't using the default drupal search either. They had a custom google search. Solr search is definitely an idea that is on our radar though.
When you click on "Advanced search" it takes you straight to the Drupal core search.
For example: http://www.java.net/search/node/j2ee
@Ryan, your comment made me laugh. Maybe you're right about the win 95-look, but anyway I think the site is nice.
I like the minimalistic design.
There's no caveat though: the underlying HTML code heavily uses tables for layout! One wouldn't expect a leading technology's website to use obsolete methods!
Strange that they haven't enabled css or javascript optimization... I wonder why not?
Looks like you caught it in the 3 seconds we were resetting those :)