Introduction, Create.js

Hi,

I joined the RWW group today, and thought brief introductions would be in
order. Some of you probably already know me through the RDFa and JSON-LD
groups, or the various open source communities I participate in.

My introduction to a "writable web" came with early CMS work in the 90s
that eventually resulted in the Midgard open source CMS:
http://midgard-project.org

Since then, the focus has been more on bringing web editing to the browser
side by connecting technologies like RDFa and contentEditable. The idea is
that we could improve all CMSs together by decoupling the editing tools
from the server implementations of content storage and page generation.

The original description of "Decoupled Content Management" can be found
from this blog post:
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/decoupling_content_management/
A video version is also available: http://vimeo.com/45633052

This concept resonated quite well in the CMS community, and the two main
libraries we build for front end editing have reached a wide adoption.

VIE (http://viejs.org) is the underlaying library that manages editable
content on the client side through Backbone.js, using JSON-LD as the server
communications layer and RDFa as the HTML-side data binding.

Create.js (http://createjs.org) builds on top of VIE, and adds the
necessary UI layer for editing content on the browser, including features
like workflows and locally-saved drafts.

In addition to making content editing easier, I'm currently also exploring
the editability of "web behaviors" through the concept of Flow-Based
Programming as implemented in JavaScript with NoFlo (http://noflojs.org).
Here the idea is to build a kinetic web UI prototyping tool somewhat along
the lines of Quarz Composer. If you have a touch-enabled browser, you can
see a simple demo of this in http://noflojs.org/demo/touch.html

If you're interested in how my ideas on this have evolved through the time,
here is the archive of blog posts around a writable web stretching back to
2003: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/category/oscom/

I'm originally from Finland, but currently staying in Berlin, Germany.

/Henri