Database - centered CMS application framework DB-CMS
Specification and architecture

© 2004 Jean-Marc Vanel

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Specifications

I'm looking for an open source Web application framework. An active site with desired features (unfortunately not developped with open source techniques) is FishBase .
To put it shortly, the application sits at the intersection of two families of products:
Let us call this application framework DB-CMS.

CMS features

This dual nature means that our DB-CMS application shall be centered on a Relational Database (or maybe some other kind of database), and also have features of CMS:
    1. mail-identified users that can propose updates: new rows in tables, or changes in existing rows, or deletions of rows
    2. content administrators that will review and accept proposed updates
    3. database administrators that have all the rights

Database Management features

Contrary to most existing CMS systems, the content will be structured according to a Database Management System (Relational, XML, or Object-Oriented). Contrary to most existing Database Management System, it will be for end-users.

Consulting the data

The list of features related to Database Management, for consulting the data, are:

Modifying the data

The list of features related to modifying the data are:

Possible frameworks

Web tools


Project
Platform/
language
Features
Comments
eXist
XQuery/Java
XQuery language is superior to PHP, JSP etc; input and search forms could be generated from an XML Schema; user management OK;
XQuery and XML databases are currently little known techniques
dadabik.org PHP
generation of input and search pages
generates directly the input and search forms from the database




ERW
PHP
Generates nice HTML + Javascript input forms, and search forms below table view, but nothing configurable
Has an XML-based language to specify the schema + table and fields labels. See Demos:  Library (schema),  Ghoti (schema)
phpCMS
PHP


mySiteMaker Perl

mySiteMaker is a collection of CGI tools written in Perl for rapidly creating web interfaces to MySQL database tables. The primary goal of this project is to make accessing data in database tables as easy, convenient and simple as possible.

Generates customizable query forms
phpCodeGenie PHP
DAO (Data Access Object) class code , forms, queries, are generated  from a table. simple PHP code is generated




Nukes/JBoss Java
Content Management modeled after PostNuke Nothing special for relational DB - See this article by JBoss' boss:
ONJava.com: Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS
PostNuke PHP
CMS
doesn't seem to have a DB-oriented module
Magnolia
Java, JSP, JSTL
A content management system.
Magnolia uses the upcoming standard API for java content repositories (JCR) (JSR-170) to access its content.
???




Plone
Zope/Python
CMS
builtin object-oriented database
zetadb
Zope/
Python
RAD for relational database oriented applications looks good ...





Non-web tools

Project Platform/
language
Features Comments
QueryForm Java Swing stand-alone Swing GUI - A form-based front-end for relational databases.
Java SQL Admin Tool Java Swing stand-alone Swing GUI - Allows you to manage a RDBMS via Java and JDBC.
Squirrel
Java Swing stand-alone Swing GUI

agata.org PHP-GTK non-Web reporting tool with graph generation and query tool