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Ha, after almost 3 years, the home page of my (so far) biggest Open Source project AWF-CMS is online again. When I started working for Zend in 2006/2007, I felt the need to write a version that is based on Zend Framework. Of course I was busy with my customer projects, so that never happened. Even worse, due to a server upgrade, the configuration for the AWF Web site was broken and I didn’t even find the time to fix that until today. This is bad, as I still love the software. It was really useful and probably still is, even though not properly maintained anymore. As you can see, I decided to use WordPress as a replacement. But there is no cool image management/gallery, there is no Wiki, there is just a HTML/WYSIWYG editor for content etc. This is way behind what AWF-CMS could deliver. At least it is possible to manage multiple sites since WordPress 3.0 – a feature that was available in AWF for a very long time.

Anyways, you can not dance on every party, as we say in Germany

My blog was a calm place for a while now, because I’m terribly busy with writing code (like it should be…). With this posting, I want to present the prototype of JavaScript Components, which are comparable to Swing Components in Java. They make use of the Composite Pattern. That means every Component can act as a container for other Components. Together with Models, Views and a Controller (Event Dispatcher), they can form reusable widgets. Other projects did work on similar things (for example jMaki Widgets), but from what I see, they target different audiences. The suggested Components use a client-side only approach. They are tested with JavaScriptMVC, but may be useful for other frameworks as well. jQuery is required for DOM operations.

There already is a LayersComponent, which implements a content stack. Any component can be added as a new layer and only the respective top layer is visible.

Please check out the demo application (download as ZIP).