From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Makumba is a query-centric application
framework using the model-view-controller pattern and designed
to develop data driven web applications. It provides a custom JSP
tag-library as a main interface, but leaves API open for advanced access.
It is implemented in Java.
Background
Makumba is an open-source infrastructure technology helping its
users to put together data-driven web applications for medium and
large audiences in a rapid, architecturally-sound and sustainable
manner. Makumba is aimed towards communities of programmers of
varying competencies, from HTML, through SQL, procedural
programming, to object-oriented programming in Java. Many of its
users have followed this learning path from simple scripting to
professional programming, and later built on this experience,
finding jobs in IT consulting companies.
Makumba was designed and partly implemented in the context of a
PhD thesis at KTH, as part of a larger
project aiming to help amateur and voluntary communities to design
and implement their own software [1]. The
main setting for use of Makumba is the pan-European voluntary
student organisation called BEST (Board of European
Students of Technology), present in 83 technical universities
across Europe. The organisation runs applications for its members
(over 1500 users) and for its student "customers" (around 10000
users every year, a third of whom attend the 1-2 week courses
organised by BEST). Applications are of varying natures: document
sharing, membership databases, registering and processing
applications to internal and external events, shared calendars,
virtual job fair, etc. The applications are designed, developed and
maintained by the "IT group", a distributed group with no physical
premises, meeting several times a year. Like in the rest of the
organisation, students come in and out of the group on a regular
basis, as people finish studies or run into family or job
obligations after finishing studies. In this context, it is a
challenge for the IT group to sustain long-term activities such as
application design and development, which sometimes span several
generations of voluntary members. Attracting new members in itself
(i.e. sustaing the whole group) is a challenge.
Since the adoption of Makumba in 2002, the IT group size stayed
steadily over 20. A large number of new sub-applications are
proposed, prototyped (using e.g. PowerPoint) and
implemented on a regular basis, and the common database allows them
to be fully integrated with the Makumba-based system of the
organisation, which now features around 100 data types, 1500 JSP
scripts and 150 Java modules.
Design
features
Makumba has been designed specifically to answer the needs of
groups and communities as the one described previously. Its main
design principles are:
- low learning threshold that prospective users have to face. It
is commonly believed that a prospective member of a community using
Makumba can start to contribute to the larger system after a 3 hour
training. By contribution it is meant accessing the database and
displaying results in a meaningful manner for the other
members.
- separation of learning tasks. This allows people who do not yet
know professional-level languages to join, and learn them later
from or together their peers. Makumba supports a "graceful learning
path"
- the architecture that allows several subgroups to work on
several parts of the system, and also enforces a
model-view-controller separation, leading to a robust system over
the long term, despite frequent membership changes
Key
features
- Easy readable
- Property based data definition types
- JSP
taglib that generates html based on the data type and operation
(listing, adding, editing etc.)
- Optional Business Logic in Java that gives the developers
access to advanced features
- MVC based framework
- Support of Object Query Language and Hibernate Query Language
Notes
- ^
Cristian Bogdan (2003) (PDF). IT Design for Amateur
Communities. http://www.nada.kth.se/%7Ecristi/thesis/final.pdf.
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