Mar
18
Written by:
Chris L Bennett
3/18/2009 8:11 PM
Over the past couple of months, I've made several different packages with Open Web Studio. And after creating a simple content version package, article manager and a link exchange system I think it is a great tool for creating simple packages.
Unfortunately, the script language it inherited from listX is not exactly easy to master. Not only is the script language a bit difficult, but there is very little documentation available. I was able to learn it by starting with the listX documentation and downloading as many examples as I could find. Nonetheless this is time consuming.
I do believe they have started to address the short comings. Lately, the OpenWebStudio site has drastically improved the content available on the wiki. The lack of information is mainly why I published the packages I've created for this site. There is also a page on the wiki describing changes to the script language to make it more usable.
Even though OpenWebStudio is still fairly new, I would have to conclude that is a very good tool for creating fairly simple packages to augment DotNetNuke. However, if you intend to create complex modules, I would recommend creating native .Net code.
6 comment(s) so far...
Re: Thoughts on OpenWebStudio
Here at R2integrated we do some pretty robust, complex sites using Open Web Studio. What would be an example of a "complex module" for which you'd want to use .Net instead?
By Walter on
4/16/2009 3:53 PM
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Re: Thoughts on OpenWebStudio
Here at R2integrated we do some pretty robust, complex sites using Open Web Studio. What would be an example of a "complex module" for which you'd want to use .Net instead?
By Walter on
4/17/2009 5:46 AM
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Re: Thoughts on OpenWebStudio
You bring up a valid point. I do agree that OWS is robust and capable of creating complex modules. However, the next module I'm planning to create is a module that pulls in multiple rss feeds, filters them, stores the results in a DB. Displays a sorted list of those feeds in DNN, then allow a Google module to pull the sorted results.
While I do know that OWS does have the ability to pull feeds, I do not believe it has the ability to aggregate and store the results at a regular interval. There are other ways to accomplish this including Yahoo Pipes. I wanted to store the results to make the google module faster.
I failed to mention in the post above in that OWS does have the advantage that you do not need to go through the headache of creating a DNN module with all of the settings.
If OWS is capable of performing some or all, please let me know.
Thanks for the comment.
By chris on
4/17/2009 8:59 AM
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Re: Thoughts on OpenWebStudio
I posed this to one of our senior software engineers and I think you'll be very interested in his response:
RSS is nothing more than XMLwith some well-known nodes and attributes. OWS can certainly download an RSS feed and store the raw results in a table. OWS can actually query XML and return results, just like a SQL query. The upcoming version of OWS can run as a native DNN service, so the config can be kicked off with a schedule.
The only difficulty in this is that there are several different flavors of RSS. Those flavors each have their own namespaces, so a good query that will work with any given feed is the real challenge. Perhaps the settings for the module can include a dropdown to select the type of feed, which would change the query.
So, the only thing that the current version can't do is operate on a schedule (so far as I know).
Bob Gates - Senior Software Engineer
R2integrated
By Walter on
4/17/2009 8:44 PM
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Re: Thoughts on OpenWebStudio
Another comment from our staff:
Kevin has recently added some improvements to OWS that allow it to run as a DNN service. I don't know all of the details but it seems germain. That version should be released some time next week iirc.
By Walter on
4/20/2009 6:13 AM
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Re: Thoughts on OpenWebStudio
I will certainly go out and grab the new version of the code once it becomes available. Then, I'll go ahead and create the module I was planning on in OWS. After its complete, I'll release the code on my software page. Thanks for the feedback.
By chris on
4/20/2009 8:05 AM
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