On 6/25/01 12:42 PM, "Raymond Barglow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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. Turbine integrates many technologies, Velocity is one of them. Velocity provides the view portion of the MVC model in Turbine. Turbine provides a lot, you don't have to write much yourself but there is a learning curve. We do provide the Turbine Development Kit (TDK) which provides a small sample application that is still lacking but you can get it up in running minutes so that you can evaluate Turbine for yourself. > > 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.) Cool. I am very interested in these topics myself, so much so that I would be willing to help you in private if you required it. I have been greatly influenced by the writings of Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Theodore Rozak, J. Ellul and a couple of Canadians you might not be that familiar with (I'm Canadian :-)): George Grant and Ursala Franklin (she's actually a metallurgist). I would definitely be interested in further discussion, but this list is not the place for it. > 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. Definitely. > 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. You can actually use all these tools. Turbine uses Velocity, and can use WebMacro too (though I don't recommend it as it is falling by the wayside given the success of Velocity). You can also use Dreamweaer if you like. > If someone out there can advise us, we will be very thankful. Sure, if you give me some more details I can probably whip you up a little schema and sample applications so that you can try things out for yourself. There is a lot in Turbine and it's by no means easy to get up to speed. Even after looking at the sample app you're going to have a mountain of questions. But if you want to take a peek at Turbine I'd be more than willing to help given the subject matter. > Raymond Barglow > Berkeley, CA > 510-486-1050 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- jvz. Jason van Zyl http://tambora.zenplex.org http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity http://jakarta.apache.org/alexandria http://jakarta.apache.org/commons --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
