What's this Joppla stuff?
Joppla is an flly J2EE compliant, open source XML, XSLT and adapter based publishing platform. Joppla consists of a scheduling framework and web based administration console that both share a common metadata repository. The scheduling framework allows for scheduled automated generation and delivery of publications. The web based administration console allows users to easily define publications, and schedule these publications for generation and delivery. So basically the web based administration console allows for editing metadata in the repository, which is picked up by the scheduling framework. More info will be provided in the user manual that will be available with the first version of Joppla.
Joppla features
The first version of Joppla will feature:
- Definition of documents, based on datatemplates and stylesheets
- XML datatemplates containing queries for generating XML source data
- Standard XSLT and/or XSL-FO stylesheets can be used for documents
- Definition of documents as an overlay for other documents (background)
- Scheduling documents to be generated and delivered at a specific time and -interval
- Delivery of the individual generated documents or aggregated (batch) delivery
- Addition of OMR watermarks (control marks for automatic folding/cutting machines)
- Delivery through adapters (e.g. printer, email, filesystem, ftp, etc.)
- and much much more...
History of Joppla
While working together on a project, we were working with a Java based commercial publishing product. This product allows companies to define templates for publication, and scheduling these publications to run automatically. These publications are e.g. letters, emails, reports, etc. Although the product is based on XML and XSLT technology, it depends heavily on proprietary code and libraries for generation and delivery of the documents. Also, the web based configuration on the server has several limitations. So we decided to make an open source based product, similar to the product we were working with. So Joppla was born, using pure open source and J2EE libraries and technology like JSF, Apache FOP, iText, JavaMail, etc.
So what's next...
At this stage we're still in the specification and planning stage. Although we have a rough first version of Joppla, it will take some more time to refactor it and rewrite it from using the commercial libraries to open source. We will announce a planning of the first milestones on this site, so please check back regularly for updates on this site, or join the joppla mailing list. We will try and post as many of the specification, planning and architecture documents on sourceforge as possible.
About the developers
Mr. Pink is a senior Java developer and teamlead, with 8 years of solid Java development experience. You can find
Mr. Pink's website here.
Mr. White is a senior Oracle/Java and integration consultant, with 8 years experience in
developing everything from industrial to e-commerce applications. You can find Mr. White's website
here.
About the site...
This site is valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS. It uses no tables for the layout. We found the template for our site on OSWD, and like to thank Matt Hollis for this template based on the original design by Adam Particka.