RESTful web services and information sharing

For years web services have been identified with SOAP and XML-RPC and creating and using web services has been considered a task for advanced programmers, a situation that has limited the large-scale adoption of this technology.

Over the last few years, many big actors (1) in the Internet have started offering remote APIs through RESTful (2) web services.

Drupal CMS

Drupal (www.drupal.org) is a CMS written in PHP.
Drupal is quite reliable and you can have a website running in a very few moves even if you don’t know PHP.

There are only a few themes (graphic templates) available and they are all very similar, but you can write your own template in PHP once you understand how to do it (basically, you copy one of the core themes and change it as you like it). And there are a lot of modules available for download from the Drupal website, which allow you to do a lot of interesting things without programming (like aggregating RSS news from other websites, creating a calendar of events etc.).

Infoglue CMS

InfoGlue (www.infoglue.org) is a CMS written in Java.
InfoGlue is the CMS used for EGFAR.

The strong points of InfoGlue are: its reliability, its very good Model-View-Controller (MVC) model implementation, its in-built support for categorisation, its ability to create infinite content types, the very granular management of users and permissions, the powerful API and custom JSP tags which make it more a framework than a simple CMS and the ease of use once the system has been set up.

Web 2.0 and the proliferation of communities

Reply to a message from Don Osborn on the Web2forDev DGroup raising the issue of reduced participation in Web 2.0 tools due to registration/login screen.

I think the point raised by Don Osborn is a real issue when it comes to participation in Web 2.0 tools.

This is part of a more general aspect of Web 2.0: the proliferation of communities.

With Web 2.0, services are typically built for / by a community. Communities very often overlap but remain separate and this sometimes discourages participation in new communities and makes participation in similar but separate communities a repetitive and fatiguing task.

I think something that should be looked into are existing efforts towards “universal user accounts”, or more technically “decentralized single sign-on systems”, like the Open ID initiative. At least in the agricultural / development community, ways should be explored to access different communities with as few as possible accounts, hopefully one.

And something can be done to make participation in several similar/related communities easier, like providing cross-posting tools and some forms of cross-display (like displaying RSS from related forums/wikis).

This is something that is already happening in some communities but not in all.

It would be interesting to hear of successful experiences in this.