Dear Turbine afficionados,
This is my very first message to this board. This is our predicament:
At New College of California, a small liberal arts college in San
Francisco, we (four of us in all) are working, on a volunteer basis,
with a non-profit organization called "Manos" that aims to build a web
presence. I have some design/programming experience in C, Unix, and
building databases, but have never been involved in the creation of a
Web application. The three others have varying experience, but know
little about building a database-backed website. Which is why we could
use some good advice.
Manos, our client, is an organization through which Latin American
workers, usually newly arrived to this country, find work in people's
homes, e.g. doing house cleaning, elder care, carpentry, painting, etc.
People needing such home services could log in to the Manos website and
find someone qualified to work for them.
We plan to use Apache/Tomcat and an Oracle database running under Linux.
That may be overkill, but we want room to expand. We also have the free
use of an Oracle system, so expense is not a major issue in this
regard. We want also to develop this system in Java. But beyond these
choices, we're at sea, swimming (not yet sinking) amidst the plethora of
alternatives. Turbine? WebMacro? Velocity? Dreamweaver/Ultradev? We
barely know the meaning of these words, let alone which to marry
ourselves to. Our aim is to facilitate project development, and not to
build from scratch, if possible.
The plot thickens: I am organizing a new IT curriculum for New College
in San Francisco. This curriculum will not only teach technical skills,
but will also examine the social and political foundations of the world
we inhabit, including the roles of science and technology within it. We
also intend to arrange technology exchange programs with people abroad.
(Should this project interest you, please visit
www.newcollege.edu/infotechnology, where we explain what we have in
mind.) Hence the website that we build for Manos will also be an object
lesson for our students. Students in our new program who study this
website should be able to see all of the source code. We don't want to
be playing with any tinkertoys that we can't see and understand -- no
black boxes, please..We developers too will be learning everything as we
go along, which will be facilitated if all of the source is available to
us.
As I mentioned, we would rather not build from scratch, but adapt
something that already exists -- perhaps an already existing application
that we can learn from and adapt to our purposes. We'll initially have
a handful of tables -- one containing worker records, another containing
homeowner records, a third containing contracts arranged between these
two parties, etc. We will build out in the direction of billing and
multi-language functionality. My guess is that we want to use Model 2
programming, which is followed by products like Turbine. Might Turbine
be appropriate for us? More so than WebMacro, or Velocity? More so
than another tool such as DreamWeaver/Ultradev? Are there existing
applications written with these tools that we could learn from and
modify to meet our needs.
If someone out there can advise us, we will be very thankful.
Raymond Barglow
Berkeley, CA
510-486-1050
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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