As some of you may or may not know, the newly relaunched moztips.com site is powered by a collection of powerful open source tools - both on the server side and also on the browser side.

A few years ago I would have hardly imagined that with hard work, perseverance, and employing the right open source technologies, I could bring to fruition an easy to use, cross-platform / cross browser content management system.

Rilke CMS, which powers this site, was made possible because of the availability of many quality open source libraries and components.

For one, take the rich text editing component, HTMLarea 3, which was made by interactivetools.com. It provides cross-browser rich text editing capabilities. It is written by a brilliant Romanian programmer, Mihai "Mishoo" Bazon, who evidently knows what he is doing when it comes to JavaScript.

But for HTMLarea 3 to work with Mozilla, Mozilla needs to make the funtionality of Mozilla Composer available inside of a textarea. This was made possible by the Midas / Rich Text Editing Specification project.

As I understand it, the Midas functionality was added to Mozilla by several developers at Netscape*, at the request of IBM. I can see many reasons why IBM would want Mozilla to be able to edit HTML documents/fragments inside of textareas: with this functionality, Mozilla would be the only Linux browser capable of providing a rich text editing frontend for a content management system. Put more simply, people who used Linux would now be able to add links, pictures, bold text and so on to webmail messages, website documents, weblog posts, and so on.

IBM has long been a big player in the enterprise web application field, and it's clear that IBM as well as others will benefit from this addition to Mozilla.

Since Midas finally adds to Mozilla the document editing functionality that Internet Explorer has long provided, JavaScript applications (such as HTMLarea) can make an editing interface available to both Mozilla and Internet Explorer. So there's no need for bulky Java applets to be loaded - it's (faster) JavaScript that's interacting with Internet Explorer's and Mozilla's built in rich text editing mechanisms.

As far as I understand it, Midas exposes the functionality of Mozilla Composer to a normal textarea, via JavaScript. So the user interface is done in HTML and JavaScript, but the actual editing is done by Mozilla Composer.

I recently read that Daniel Glazman, the principal developer of Mozilla Composer, is set to form a company promoting Mozilla Composer. I could not be happier!

As you can see, the attractiveness and viability of many open source web applications hinges on Mozilla's continued support of Composer, Midas and other related technologies.

Mozilla Composer is not just a tool for making webpages offline and uploading them via FTP. It can be a visual frontend to a variety of open source content management systems.

Before I conclude, I should also mention that Rilke CMS would not have been possible without the server side scripting language PHP and the associated PEAR libraries.

PHP provides an outstanding framework upon which web applications can be rapidly and reliably built. Finally, the PEAR libraries provide snap-in access to functionality such as authentication (sign in), email, and XML processing.

I think that effective co-operation between the Mozilla Foundation / Mozilla Community and the PHP community could make open source, cross platform content management systems more compelling than ever before.

*Update: I was informed that several developers at Netscape, not Doron Rosenberg created Midas.

Category: Tech Landscape

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