Thursday, June 19, 2008
COR - Why make it free?
COR, which stands for 'Controls On the Right', provides the foundation block allowing mere mortals to build and maintain web sites. That is the goal behind our new BSD licensed project.
Briefly, COR is a project available on CodePlex that allows anyone to become a guru at designing and building web sites. You probably need an expert to set it up, but once set up 'mere mortals' can develop pages and update content. It also helps if you have a graphic artist to help with the color schemes and provide some banner graphics.
We built COR because we were tired of building our site. We didn't have a lot money to hire someone build and maintain our site, so we needed to do it. We quickly became tired of constantly hand coding HTML and patching pages together from a half dozen tools. After re-building the same page a number times by hand we decided we were going to automate. Our goal for COR was that only a Web browser was required to build or change Web pages. The running joke was "After all, how hard can it be?". Well as it turns out it is always harder (and takes longer) than you think, but using ASP.Net 2.0 it was manageable. In fact using a lot of tools in .Net bag, such as the Forms Authentication, made the entire effort viable.
We really liked the modular Web Part concept and the way SharePoint allows users to create Web pages. We would have used SharePoint, but our ISP, as is the case with most ISPs, didn't support SharePoint. So both Web Parts and SharePoint style web page editing is a key feature of COR.
We use COR internally because we are also mere mortals. Our websites http://www.trackerrealm.com/ and http://www.jetfire.ca/ are built with it. We also have numerous other websites using it. We like it. We like it so much that we think it should be everywhere. We'd like to get paid for COR, but that is just not going to happen. So we decided to go for fame and glory. What better way to do that then to make it freely available, with source code, and a very permissive license.
Finally COR is a foundation block for our Jetfire Web offerings. Check out Cor on Codeplex.
Briefly, COR is a project available on CodePlex that allows anyone to become a guru at designing and building web sites. You probably need an expert to set it up, but once set up 'mere mortals' can develop pages and update content. It also helps if you have a graphic artist to help with the color schemes and provide some banner graphics.
We built COR because we were tired of building our site. We didn't have a lot money to hire someone build and maintain our site, so we needed to do it. We quickly became tired of constantly hand coding HTML and patching pages together from a half dozen tools. After re-building the same page a number times by hand we decided we were going to automate. Our goal for COR was that only a Web browser was required to build or change Web pages. The running joke was "After all, how hard can it be?". Well as it turns out it is always harder (and takes longer) than you think, but using ASP.Net 2.0 it was manageable. In fact using a lot of tools in .Net bag, such as the Forms Authentication, made the entire effort viable.
We really liked the modular Web Part concept and the way SharePoint allows users to create Web pages. We would have used SharePoint, but our ISP, as is the case with most ISPs, didn't support SharePoint. So both Web Parts and SharePoint style web page editing is a key feature of COR.
We use COR internally because we are also mere mortals. Our websites http://www.trackerrealm.com/ and http://www.jetfire.ca/ are built with it. We also have numerous other websites using it. We like it. We like it so much that we think it should be everywhere. We'd like to get paid for COR, but that is just not going to happen. So we decided to go for fame and glory. What better way to do that then to make it freely available, with source code, and a very permissive license.
Finally COR is a foundation block for our Jetfire Web offerings. Check out Cor on Codeplex.
# posted by John Hansen @ 1:22 PM 
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