[ANN] release of CubicWeb 3.0.0

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