- From: Nicolas Chauvat <nicolas.chauvat@logilab.fr>
- Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:46:11 +0100
- To: semantic-web@w3.org
Hello Semantic Web, The development team is pleased to announce the release of CubicWeb 3.0.0 (nicknamed ShowTime). What is CubicWeb? ----------------- With CubicWeb, the Semantic Web is a construction game! CubicWeb_ is a semantic web application framework, licensed under the LGPL, that empowers developers to efficiently build web applications by reusing components (called cubes) and following the well known object-oriented design principles. Its main features are: * an engine driven by the explicit data model of the application, * a query language named RQL similar to W3C’s SPARQL, * a selection+view mechanism for semi-automatic XHTML/XML/JSON/text generation, * a library of reusable components (data model and views) that fulfill common needs, * the power and flexibility of the Python programming language, * the reliability of SQL databases, LDAP directories, Subversion and Mercurial for storage backends. Being built since 2000 by an R&D project still going on today, supporting 100,000s of daily visits at some production sites, CubicWeb is a proven end to end solution for semantic web application development that promotes quality, reusability and efficiency. The unbeliever will read the quick overview_ of CubicWeb. The hacker will join development at the forge_. The impatient will move right away to installation_ and set-up of a CubicWeb environment. ... _cubicweb: http://www.cubicweb.org/ ... _overview: http://www.cubicweb.org/doc/en/A020-tutorial.en.html#overview ... _forge: http://www.cubicweb.org/project?vtitle=All%20cubicweb%20projects ... _installation: http://www.cubicweb.org/doc/en/C010-setup.en.html#miseenplaceenv Home page --------- http://www.cubicweb.org/ Download -------- http://ftp.logilab.org/pub/cubicweb/ Mailing list ------------ http://lists.cubicweb.org/mailman/listinfo/cubicweb License ------- LGPL - Lesser General Public License boils down to "share your modifications to our code, not the rest of your code". Remarks ------- Some readers of this list will surely want to discuss the claim of being called a "semantic web application framework". Here is the short answer: as opposed to web application frameworks oriented towards publishing documents as HTML, the core of the CubicWeb framework is only about managing data (modeling data, querying data, transforming data, etc.) and the web front-end is only about applying views to selections of data to generate various outputs including the ubiquitous HTML. A good demonstration of the capabilities of CubicWeb is http://www.musees-haute-normandie.fr/collections/ (sorry, french only) that provides facets to select art items and tabs to chose how to display the selected items. An advanced user can export the selection to XML in a mouse click. It is true that not all W3C standards are supported at this point, but rendering data to RDF, n3, etc. or publishing the data model as OWL is trivial with the CubicWeb architecture and is not done yet because we are always short on time and it was not required by any application put in production up to this day. Implementing a RDF view for some data type would be an good exercise for the interested reader and should not take more than a day or two. I suppose http://www.cubicweb.org/doc/en/B4040-rss-xml.en.html is something many readers of this list will find interesting after they are done with the tutorial. Last but not least, this is free(dom) software and all users are more than welcome to join and become contributors! I am now looking forward to your comments, but please keep in mind that we are making a living delivering production-grade software, not doing academic research, thus some things may look like lagging behind from a theoretical point of view whereas they are rather advanced from a practical one. -- Nicolas Chauvat logilab.fr - services en informatique scientifique et gestion de connaissances
Received on Wednesday, 31 December 2008 05:13:40 UTC