First up I’ll give a bit of a background into what is used to put the ovosuite together... then over time I'll be posting tidbits about the gotchas that got me, and how I overcame them.

A bit about myself first: I’ve been programming for around 10 years, started with c/c++ under windows, moved to cross platform (basically stopped using MFC and went back to ANSI C) for server side dev. In the same project the client was written using a mix of VB and MFC based activeX controls.. i did both.. This gave me a taste of DHTML because it used the DHTML control (shudder) to manage WYSIWYG template editing. I then moved on to building enterprise web applications using J2EE. We evolved an in-house framework to do this based on cocoon/mysql and jboss. We are now leveraging this experience to build ovo-suite using some tried and tested tech, mixed in with the latest web framework: ruby on rails.

Ovosuite is built using cocoon to manage the portaling functionality, while most of the portlet applications will/are be written using ruby. We decided on using cocoon for two reasons:

1. Existing experience- the previous FW we developed used cocoon on the front end: it's perfect for shunting data around the place (pretty much what a portal is)

2. Webdav support: The foundation of the ovo suite involves a DMS system. To get best OS integration (web folders), we wanted to use webdav. I couldn’t find any open source offerings written in ruby, so we decided to use Slide, a Webdav server written in Java. Cocoon and slide already co-exist quite nicely.

Now I thought I would start on a bit of a positive rant: Slide 2.1.

What can I say? They did it right (almost). We initially developed a once of solution using slide 1.0 many moons ago.. WHAT A PAINFUL EXPERIANCE!

I approached slide 2.x with a bit of trepidation.. after reading the feature set on the slide website, I was quite amazed/confidant.... until one of the other developers in the team (the one who had to do most of the slide 1.0 work) mentioned that slide had previously promised many of these features, but fell far short.

Well thank god for open source: all it took was a download of the latest branch, a quick squiz at the code and I knew we were set. Everything I needed for ovosuite is there: custom authentication, custom authorisation and events for auditing and quota management. And as an added bonus, integration with lucene, at no extra cost :) These are all the features we really missed having the first time around.

Well that’s enough for now.. I'll be posting more down the track... some rants, some raves.. and I'll try and avoid political stuff :)