We just put online the community portal for the Apogée project : apogee.nuxeo.org.

It includes a public website and a collaboration workspaces where all people interested in the project can collaborate (document sharing and reviewing with versionning, openoffice and docbook support, etc.).

We also published some design documents of the project (on the XForms engine and global architecture). This site is really expected to live and be the center of the community.

We invite all people interested to join the site and start working on documents (the mailing-list is also available for discussions).

I hope to see you there ! :-)

I am very proud to announce that we just released to the public an XForms engine for Eclipse / SWT. This plugin is part of the "Apogée" project, we recently proposed to the eclipse foundation.

The Nuxeo XForms engine allows to :

• Generate Eclipse/SWT forms from a XForms document
• Dynamically validate inputs against an XML Schema without generating an XML document (yes, it's dynamic XSD validation for Eclipse/SWT forms :-)
• For developers, introspect and test their XForms document (through a dedicated editor)

For us, this new plugin opens new perspectives for Rich Client applications : all user interface forms can be dynamically defined by the server. It's another step in unifying web interfaces and rich client applications... one form to design to create the UI in the browser and in the rich client application. One more step for the Web and Desktop convergence!

The XForms engine is generating Eclipse/SWT Forms from an XHTML/XForms document and an optional XML Schema and CSS stylesheet. This first release supports only a subset of the XForms standard is supported for now (more feature will be added in future), but still, it's really usable and useful for many needs.

The XML Schema is used for automatically validation of the generated forms. You can find more details about XML Schema support are in XML Schema Support section.

The stylesheet defines the form layout for the SWT rendering.

Get involved !

• XForms engine source code (download org.nuxeo.xforms.core, org.nuxeo.xforms.ui and org.nuxeo.xforms.ui.editors)
• XForms engine documentation
• XForms editor documentation
• Apogé mailing list

I would like to thank Bogdan Stefanescu who did that great work in less than one month! Huge work!

Get involved and stay tuned for the next step! :-)

I'm very glad to announce that our proposal "Apogée" is now online!

As I mentionned in my previous post about Apogée, this project aims at building a set of open source components to ease the creation of ECM-oriented desktop applications, supported by a strong opensource community.

We hope to get a lot of feedback soon and that many interested parties (contributors or users) will show up. Do not hesitate to contact me if you're interested, or participate to the eclipse newsgroup.

Show me the code !

We also made all the code public and available under the EPL (Eclipse Public Licence). Here it is :

• Apogee source code repository (SVN direct access)
• Apogee documentation
• Apogé mailing list

We hope that this project will be able to quickly follow the Eclipse process and that the community will grow to deliver the 1.0 final in september, as expected.
If you're interested in Enterprise Content Management, please get involved : read and comment the "Apogée" proposal. :-)

On behalf of Nuxeo, I have submitted, with great pleasure, a new proposal to the Eclipse Foundation : the Apogée project.

Maybe you are now wondering what's this about? Hence a quick resume...

This project comes from our thought about next steps in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market. More and more customers need specific application related to ECM to properly handle their data and integrate in a seamless way all their digital assets and involved processes. These applications share a lot of features and need many common services. ECM applications developers definitely need a framework that would ease the creation of this kind of desktop applications, when the browser is not enough...

Eclipse RCP is expected to play a major role for next generation desktop applications. In the ECM business, web interfaces are great, but some customers / applications need more (highly responsive interface, rich UI, desktop integration, offline mode support, etc.). I would call it the Web 2.0+1 (yes, I can play with Web version numbers too ;-): a highly dynamic application, with no deployment pain, auto-updatable, with reusable components, well integrated with the desktop and extensible, using web / internet open standards like HTTP, XHTML, XML, XMPP, XForms, etc.

We do believe that the browser won't be the only user interface and more than that, I personnaly do believe that the web is not all about the browser, it's about web / internet standard. The browser will only be a piece of tomorrow's desktop applications, Eclipse RCP will hopefully do the rest.

At Nuxeo, we already have delivered some projects in this area and have begun to create such a framework for ECM applications. We called it Apogée (yes, really!). It's time to take it to the next level. This project aims at building a framework to create ECM-oriented desktop applications, independent from vendor or technologies. This framework could be used to create applications that will be integrated with ECM platform like Nuxeo CPS, Documentum, Interwoven or any ECM platform vendor that would be interested.

OK... what's the menu?

The proposal is expected to be available in a couple of day on the Eclipse website and I'll make a note here when it will be the case, but here is some appetizers: RDF, XForms for Eclipse Forms, XML Schema, XMPP for communications, SOAP, Instant Messaging, Pluggable Editors, client/server synchronization, collaboration, synchronous and asynchronous team work, etc.

I am really exited by this project and work on it with our team since some month now. We are now going public and really hope to gather interest and convert this dream to a community-supported enterprise-grade application framework for next-generation desktop/web applications...

Note: Apogée is only the name we give to the project right now, we maybe will found a more meaningful name, after the proposal review process. :-)