Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

I went to one of our customers today to demo our Digital Asset Management System (it seems to be DAM-week, see also my presentation at the Henry Stewart Show) and one of the projects managers told me that he started playing around with Sling and how impressed he was with the power that is hidden in Sling and JCR and how easy it was to build something interesting. So, if you would like to see something cool, just as he did, download CRX Quickstart Edition, which contains CRX (a commerial grade content repository) and Sling (a web application framework built around the concepts of JCR, REST, AJAX, OSGi and Scripting) and take a look at Michael Marth's screencast first steps with CRX Quickstart. (This was the see something cool part)

Having seen something cool, it is time to learn something new, namely building applications using Sling and JCR and CRX Quickstart is a great way of doing to. Aside to the aforementioned screencast, there is a second one: the serverside.com in 15 minutes and the rest of the CRX Quickstart documentation we have assembled.

If you now want to win something shiny, namely a brand new MacBook Pro, apply your newly won knowledge and take part in the Day JCR Cup '08, which is one of the reasons we released CRX Quickstart. We want more developers to learn something new, more developers to build something cool and thought that winning something shiny might be a good incentive to do so.

Scott Hudson points to DocBook versus DITA: Will the Real Standard Please Stand Up? (slides here at dev.day.com) wriiten by my colleague Teresa Mulvihill. Scott points out that DocBook can be used for single-sourcing out of the box, thanks to support for XInclude and I would like to add that we at Day are currently in the process of translating our documentation to DocBook (not DITA) and first results are looking very promising. We are using Wilfried Springer's DocBook Maven Plugin as the driver of the processing toolchain, which is powerful, because we can integrate documentation development tightly with software development, sharing the same repository, using the same branches and tags and using the same build process.

I am very happy to announce that dev.day.com, the company blog of my employer Day Software that lives up to the great work of my colleague Michael Marth is now adjoined by PlanetDay, an aggregation of private weblogs of Day employees. So if you would like to know what is going on in the minds of Day's employees, take a look at PlanetDay.

Congratulations to Michael Marth for the successful softlaunch of dev.day.com, the developer portal for all things related to Jackrabbit, JCR, CRX, Sling and Microsling. The first part in the picture is a blog with the witty title "content goes here", which is Day's first step into blogging and will definitely not the last one.

If you are interested in Jackrabbit, JCR, Sling, content management and all the other exciting stuff we do at Day, point your feed reader to http://feeds.feedburner.com/contentGoesHereBlog.

Today is my first day in a new job. I have been hired by Day Software as product manager for their line of collaboration software, together with Alexander and Alexander, who will join Day as software developers. This means, Day has managed to hire the core team of Mindquarry and is able to absorb our know-how and ideas for Day's products.

If you ask me why - there are two answers. When Mindquarry has to close, from my point of view it did not because our topic - collaboration - had been solved by other players in the market. From my point of view, there are too many open questions in collaboration that I want to answer and too many collaboration problems that I want to solve. So the first answer is that the vision of collaborative workspaces for all knowledge workers is still intriguing for me. The second answer is that Day is the company that can execute this vision. My first contact with Day was when we started using Apache Jackrabbit for Mindquarry. Jackrabbit is the reference implementation for the Java Content Repository Specification and Day is deeply committed to both. Then I met David Nüscheler briefly at the ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam, was impressed by his deep involvement in Jackrabbit, JCR and his technical vision. Much later I learned that he is actually CTO of Day. Day also employs Carsten and Bertrand, whose work I value very highly and other prominent developers, engineers and scientists. From later talks with David and my investigations around microsling I learned that Day's vision of collaboration and content management, Day's understanding of technical problems is very close to mine and that I have found the ideal partner in terms of vision and ability to execute for creating ground-breaking new collaboration applications.

I am very happy for being able to take this opportunity and to be able to continue my work that started with Mindquarry. To everyone who supported me and my ideas with Mindquarry, I would like to say thank you and invite you to keep in touch to create better software for better collaboration.

If you would like to contact me, use lars.trieloff@day.com for e-mail or ltrielof@day.com for Jabber instant messaging.