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• Project Name: Blandware AtLeap
• Latest Release: 0.52
• Latest Release Status: Production
• Project Type: Web Application

Blandware AtLeap is a multilingual free Java CMS (Content Management System) with full-text search engine. Blandware AtLeap is a framework which allows you to rapidly start your own Web application.

The idea of the AtLeap project is based on my many years’ experience of management in the area of the site development. Blandware AtLeap is destined to creating both content-based sites and web applications with complicated business logic.

The most part of the site development and maintenance processes is the content (mainly texts) modifications in accordance with changeable customer requirements. There is CMS necessity which can allow shifting this routine work from technical to content specialists (advertising manager, linguist, translator etc.) who usually has not HTML knowledge or even to the customer representative who possesses most up-to-date and precise information in application domain.

Blandware AtLeap has the following features:

• Simplicity of using. You can navigate on your site and choose editable areas by double mouse click or context menu. Blandware AtLeap has rich text formatting possibilities (changing fonts and colors, inserting lists, tables, images, flashes, links etc.) using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which allows to import texts from Microsoft Word. AtLeap supports two different WYSIWYG editors: FCKEditor and TinyMCE.
• Multilingual content. There is an ability to store content on several languages simultaneously in UTF-8 encoding. 100% of content are stored in the database. You can edit any data using web interface. AtLeap allows all available pages to be indexed on all languages by external search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc). The Administrative console on following languages: English, Russian, Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian.
• Full text search engine. The embedded engine provides ability to search on several languages (English, Spanish, Russian, German, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Czech, Greek etc.) taking into account inflexions and stop words. Indexing the following document formats: RTF, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, XHTML, XML, TXT.
• Individualization. AtLeap’s CMS ideology does not restrict creative graphical design of the site. The customer does not want template, banal routine graphical design. Blandware AtLeap allows creating individual, unique, exceptional solution.
• Included modules. AtLeap has the following modules:
  • News with publication and expires dates
  • Testimonials with random showing
  • Contact us
  • Site map with auto generation
  • Forums with watching forum and/or topic
  • Questionnaires: custom question form creation; types of questions: line, multi-line, checkbox, radiobutton, list, multi-list
  • Statistics of visitors with properties: browsers, monitor resolution, entry pages, exit pages, browsing paths, search engines, search keywords, etc...

However nowadays the site has a lot except of content. The site can have complicated business logic. That's why the AtLeap project is initially based on AppFuse project which has already integrated modern open source practices.

Blandware AtLeap is:

• Lightweight. It does not require (but can be run on) heavy and/or expensive EJB (Enterprise Java Bean) application server to run.
• Independent from:
  • Hardware platform and operational system, implemented using JavaTM technology. Currently AtLeap is tested on:
    • Sun JDK 1.4.2, 1.5.0, 1.6.0
    • IBM JDK 1.4.2
    • Bea JRockit JDK 1.5.0
  • Database management system (supports about 16). Currently AtLeap is tested on:
    • MySQL 4.0, 4.1, 5.0 (MyISAM and InnoDB)
    • PostgreSQL 7.4, 8.0
    • Oracle 10.1
    • Hypersonic 1.8.0.2
    • Derby 10.1.1.0, 10.1.2.1
    • IBM DB2 8.2
    • MS SQL 7.0
  • Servlet-container. It can be runs on all servlet containers which implement JSR 152: JavaServer Pages^TM 2.0 and JSR 154: Java^TM Servlet 2.4 specifications (e.g. Tomcat) including all J2EE 1.4 compatible application servers. Currently AtLeap is tested on (and has installation scripts):
    • Apache Tomcat 5.x, 6.x
    • Caucho Resin 3.0.15+
    • JBoss 4.0.1, 4.0.2
    • Geronimo 1.0 and IBM WebSphere Community Edition 1.0.1.2
    • ObjectWeb JOnAS 4.4.3
    • Jetty 5.1.10
    • IBM WebSphere 6
    • BEA Weblogic 9
    • Sun Java System AS 8.1, 8.2, 9.0 build 42
    • Oracle AS (Orion) 10.1.3
  • Browser. Blandware AtLeap is compatible with:
    • Internet Explorer 5.5+
    • Mozilla 1.3+
    • Netscape 7+
    • FireFox 1.0+
    • Opera 9+ (with restrictions)
    • Safari 2+ (with restrictions)
• Stable
  • Multi-user work, implemented using application transactions (optimistic concurrency control). As for big texts you can even merge simultaneously edited content.
  • Database transactions: rollbacks and pessimistic locking.
  • The big texts are still saved even the HTTP session is invalidated.
  • The input forms are validated at server and client side.
  • Transparently saves state information and repopulates forms when they are redisplayed.
  • Prevents of double form submission (clinet and server side).
  • Bidirectional relationships between links and resources in order to prevent creating broken links and deleting used resources.
  • There is ability to replace almost all dependent links during changing URL of Content Page or Resource.
• Free and open source. It can be run on free open source software. Blandware AtLeap is free (under Apache 2.0 license) and its open sources provide many good design patterns and examples.
• Based on modern open source technologies: Hibernate, Spring, XDoclet, Struts, FCKEditor, Lucene, Quartz, Acegi, TinyMCE etc.

You can get more information this project in Blandware AtLeap Introduction PPT or PDF and on Russian PPT or PDF .

I hope Blandware AtLeap will allow you to "leap" many problems during site development I have already solved.

Project owner:

• Blandware AtLeap has won second place in Java contest of Sun Microsystems. Read announce (or on Russian), also see my impressions in my weblog posts: about contest and photos.
• Blandware AtLeap has won second place in software developers contest of Intel corporation. Read about it in my blog's post and see photos or on Russian contest's site.
• Blandware AtLeap has won first place in contest Programmer-2006. See diploma in my blog's post.
• Blandware AtLeap has won third place in contest GoldWeb-2006. See diploma in my blog's post.
• Blandware AtLeap has won in IBM WebSphere Community Edition Contest 2006. See diploma in my blog's post.

• Hong Zhang says about AtLeap's deployment process: "The whole process went pretty smooth... The instructions that Andrey provided are very straightforward and easy to follow. The actual deployment was like a breeze."

  Hong Zhang, Member of Technical Staff, Sun Microsystems.

• The development cost of AtLeap project was estimated to 0.66 Million dollars by independent third party www.koders.com.
• The development cost of AtLeap project was estimated to 0.6 Million dollars by independent third party www.ohloh.net.

• Use a spade to dig a hole - Use a bulldozer to dig a trench - Interview of AtLeap project owner Andrey Grebnev to IndicThreads about AtLeap and not only.
• Multilingual CMS project jumps leaps and bounds for Java - 7/11/2006 Application Development Trends.
• CMS Hell; Part IV; Blandware AtLeap - 9/24/2006 The Ironism.

Online AtLeap Demo.

All this information can be available via AtLeap project Wiki.

• For a start you can read Blandware AtLeap Introduction PPT or PDF and on Russian PPT or PDF .
• Detailed documentation you can find in Admin Guide and Developer Guide.
• Other documentation can be available via AtLeap project Wiki.
• Weblog of project's owner about AtLeap - Andrey Grebnev's Weblog

AtLeap is a community-supported open-source product. You can find support by subscribing to the various mailing lists offered in this java.net project. You can also use the Discussion Forums.

At this stage, the best way to participate in this project is to use and test it. You can write to me your comments, found bugs, feature requests using mailing lists or discussion forums or if you are registered on java.net you can do it directly into Issue Tracker. I will read them with gratitude. You can share your ideas in our Wiki.

I express grateful acknowledgement to participators (Sergey Zubtcovskii, Roman Puchkovskiy and Ksenia Pozdeeva) who help me to implement my ideas.

Thanks to

• Hui Qin for translation into Chinese language
• Rainer Proebster for translation into German language
• Jesus Marin for translation into Spanish language
• Leonardo Bocchi for translation into Italian language

Blandware AtLeap is under Apache 2.0 license. This license allows you to use AtLeap in commercial projects. However every site building with AtLeap must include one of the following acknowledgements on index page:

• the visible text with link

            Powered by <a href="https://www.atleap.com">Blandware AtLeap</a>
            

• or the visible image button with link
  
  <a href="https://www.atleap.com"><img src="https://www.yourhost.com/images/powered_by.jpg" width="88" height="31" /></a>
• or the invisible (but exists) text inside HTML source code (e.g. in META tags)
  

            Powered by Blandware AtLeap (https://www.atleap.com)
            

If you are using Blandware AtLeap you can (but not obliged) send to me by email the URL of the site built with Blandware AtLeap. Your site will listed on this site. Please send the information about your site in the following format:

• Site title (required)
• URL (required)
• Short description of the site (required)
• Optional logo (not more that 90x90 px). JPG or GIF format.

Some samples of AtLeap usage:

• https://eusa.net
• https://udmpk.ru/
• https://www.awplanet.com/
• https://www.touk.pl

• Version 0.52 - [December 31, 2006]
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features (see RELEASE-NOTES for details)
• Version 0.51 - [July 09, 2006]
  • added modules: forum, questionnaires, statistics of visitors
  • ported to new version of Lucene 2.0.0
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features
• Version 0.5 - [March 26, 2006]
  • added groups support and about 130 roles in security part
  • user interface has been translated into Italian and Spanish languages
  • finished writing of Admin Guide and Developer Guide
  • added renderer for hierarchic menu
  • added JSP precompilation feature
  • ported to new versions of some libraries e.g. Lucene 1.9.1, Acegi 1.0.0rc2, Jetty 5.1.10 etc.
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features
• Version 0.5rc3 - [November 29, 2005]
  • added deployment/undeployment scripts for Application Servers: Sun Java System AS 8.1, Trifork 4.1, Oracle AS 10
  • added facility to backup/restore database at runtime (including automatic backup)
  • user interface has been translated into German language
  • we have written some parts of Admin Guide and Developer Guide
  • tested on Derby, IBM DB2, MS SQL DBMSes
  • we have written foundation classes for automating tests (including web interface)
  • ported to several new libraries including Hibernate 3.1, Spring 1.2.6
  • added support for quotation of database identifiers (table, field names, etc.)
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features
• Version 0.5rc2 - [August 26, 2005]
  • integrated additional WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE
  • added deployment/undeployment scripts for Application Servers: Geronimo, ObjectWeb JOnAS 4, Jetty 5, Bea Weblogic 9, IBM Webpshere 6
  • added facility to replace almost all dependent links during changing URL of Content Page or Resource
  • integrated Hypersonic DBMS and Jetty servlet-container in order to provide easy demonstration
  • improved JavaDocs for many classes
  • added context menus for all grids in administrative console
  • administrative console is translated into Chinese language
  • now the search is performed across several languages simultaneously
  • added client side prevention of double form submitting
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features
• Version 0.5rc1 - [July 05, 2005]
  • integrated Acegi security system to allow more flexible authentication
  • integrated Quartz scheduling system to allow auto publication and expiration of news item in news module
  • added testimonials module
  • added more flexible management of browser cache, support of page expiration
  • now all page links are generated with locale suffix, it allows all pages to be indexed by external search engines (like Google)
  • refactored internal search engine, improved performance, fixed bugs with concurrent using, added new languages support
  • now Atleap does not use ResourceBundle for small messages. All content is stored in database and can be edited via admin console
  • usability improvements (e.g. added context menu for site edit mode)
  • performance improvements
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features
• Version 0.5b3 - [May 22, 2005]
  • added HTML mail templates with inline image inclusion
  • added bidirectional relationships between ContentFieldValues, Menu items and Resources and Pages to prevent broken links.
  • tested under PostreSQL and Oracle DBMS
  • added installation scripts for Resin3 and JBoss4
  • added online documentation
  • added site map
  • performance improvements
  • fixed bugs and added some other small features
• Version 0.5b2 - [April 4, 2005]
  • added facility to manage email templates and process them using velocity
  • added new resource type document and full text search in following formats: RTF, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, XHTML, XML, TXT.
  • added facility to manage global properties stored in database
  • fixed many bugs and memory leaks
  • known bugs in Resin 3 container and PostgreSQL DBMS
• Version 0.5b1 - [March 14, 2005]
  • Open source release to java.net.

The latest development version is always available to checkout from CVS as atleap module (:pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs)

Part of the Java Enterprise Community.