An on-line programmable CMS

Dear all,

I would like to bring to your attention the availability of an on-line programmable content management system at:
http://www.afacms.com/.

It is implemented by a home-made software platform that reuses and extends Seaside and Pier CMS. For more information, please check the following post (also copied below for your convenience):
http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app

I would like to take this opportunity to thank You, and all Smalltalk communities for their outstanding contributions that have made this work possible.
Best regards,
Reza Razavi

The goal of this website is to illustrate the concept of on-line programmable CMS, i.e., a web application that behaves both as a content management and an on-line programming system. This web site is a distribution of [1]. It's by no means a production site. It actually runs on a VPS with quite limited resources.

New functionality may be implemented and integrated on-line by composing atomic services (in the sense of SOA). The site provides Seaside jQuery-based graphical interfaces for service composition [2]. For a step-by-step on-line programming guide, please check [3]. For any further inquiries, please contact me.

Atomic services may be of different kinds:
- Interactive web components, like Seaside components,
- Pure computational components, like mathematical algorithms,
- Sensing components, like measurement requests in industrial metrology,
- Actuation components, like robot commands in manufacturing, and, last but not least,
- Control flow components, like iterations and conditionals.

Websites like this one describe their atomic services as "contracts", and makes them available on-line [4]. To illustrate the applicability of this concept to diverse domains, this website proposes a variety of (rather simple) atomic services, which relate to areas such as on-line shopping (for the Seaside sushi example) [5], communication [6], e-learning for students [7], e-teaching for Older Adults [8], and entertainment [9]. Flow control constructions are also represented explicitly as contracts [10], and may be defined according to the application requirements. Other kinds of atomic services may also be added, even dynamically, depending on the application requirements.

Domain concepts that end-users care about and their instances may also be managed on-line, via a sort of on-line class and instance browser [11].

In real-life deployments, the above-mentioned on-line programming tools that are made here publicly available may be only made accessible to qualified end-users.

This web site is an example of pontoon application as I presented at IWST'2010 [12]. It's implemented by reusing and extending Seaside and Pier CMS, as also presented in an IWST'2010 paper, which will shortly be available via [13] and also the ACM DL [14]. In the meanwhile, I can provide a copy to interested parties upon request.

Application domains may be diverse [15]. We are currently investigating opportunities for very large scale deployments related to the concept of web as a service innovation platform.

References:
[1] http://www.aas-platform.com
[2] http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/
[3] http://www.afacms.com/examples
[4] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/
[5] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/shopping/
[6] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/communication/
[7] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/maths/
[8] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/elderly/
[9] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/music/
[10] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/controlflow/
[11] http://www.afacms.com/cats/concepts/
[12] http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/International%20Workshop%20on%20Smalltalk%20Technologies
[13] http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/forschung/publikationen/technische_berichte.html?L=1
[14] http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm
[15] http://www.aas-platform.com/about/applications/

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