I’m currently sitting on the train to university and using my laptop running a freshly installed copy of Vista and Windows Live Writer, I’m able to write out my entire blog posts, ready for posting when I get to university. Pretty cool stuff!
Since I got into building complex web applications, I’ve gradually built up a library of custom functions and classes, as I’m sure pretty much every programmer does over time. I’ve taken this one step further, and developed a platform which I now use to deploy all my projects around. I call it Jamdora, and I’m looking to make this open source as soon as I have time to do so! The Jamdora platform is very versatile and comes with a wide variety of classes, allowing your web application to accomplish many diverse tasks, be it creating PDF files, modifying the file system, or even creating audio files.
In its design stage, I’m looking to build a plugin system, which allows you to extend the Jamdora platform and add new functionality. One of the plugins which I have produced is a content management system (CMS). I’m not sure how best to go about creating plugins which can be easily enabled and disabled, so if anyone has any ideas or good website resources, please let me know!
The installer for Jamdora will be software based, so you will install the Jamdora straight onto your PC. During the installation, it will ask you for a few details about the web application you wish to build, and then download all the relevant files, build a solution to suit you, upload it to your web server and test that it works. My main idea here is that Jamdora is more like a piece of software and less like a website, making it easier to maintain and apply updates.
I’ve also designed the platform to be easy to use for beginner website designers, and as complex as required for advanced web developers. One of the available classes which demonstrates this beautifully is what I call the form processor, and it basically allows the user to quickly design forms, create the validation and process the forms, all with knowledge of XHTML and a small amount of PHP. However, these forms could be improved upon and AJAX enabled with a bit of knowledge of JavaScript and PHP. This gives the opportunities for website designers to get involved with the creation process and produce forms which work exactly as they originally planned.. something that can’t normally be done without knowledge of a server side language.
Why am I telling you about Jamdora if it’s not even out? Simply because a lot of the articles posted on my site will be oriented around the production of this web application platform. I thought it’d be a good idea to let you know what I’m working on, and to gain other users expertise to make Jamdora as good as it can possibly get.
Anyway, the train is about to pull into the station, so it’s time for me to be off. I hope I’ve given you a satisfactory sneak preview of what’s to come and develop over the following year. It should be exciting!
Richard Willars » Blog Archive » Working for Escouts
February 9th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
[…] integrated together, so they share user sessions and information. To do this, I suggested we use Jamdora, my web application platform. After typing up a few pages of documentation and letting the team […]