An overview of Crafter rivet
Crafter rivet provides Web application developers with an open source framework for building content-rich applications, including next-generation enterprise Web sites, portals, and social networking platforms. Crafter rivet provides the foundation for quickly building high-performance, flexible Web content delivery systems - delivering content that is managed by Web content management systems like Alfresco WCM. Built as an enterprise-grade JEE platform, Crafter rivet provides a solid infrastructure that not only integrates well with enterprise systems and deployment infrastructure, but also supports a full-range of presentation-tier technologies including lightweight scripting and REST-based APIs.
Why Crafter rivet?
In true open source fashion, Rivet Logic built the Crafter rivet to "scratch an itch" - that is, to fill a void in the open source enterprise-grade WCM landscape. In the past three years and over the course of numerous real-world implementations, Rivet Logic has built Crafter rivet to address the need for a high-performance, flexible, and easy to use Web content delivery framework that:
- consumes and processes XML-based Web content published from open source WCM platforms like Alfresco
- integrates well with enterprise back-end systems like e-commerce, Web analytics, third-party search, single sign-on, persistence frameworks, RSS/ATOM, blogging platforms and other social applications
- natively integrates with social applications like Facebook and Open Social
- complements and enables the use of a variety of presentation-tier frameworks and languages for building content-rich Web applications, including JBoss Seam, Groovy/Grails, Alfresco Surf, Liferay Portal, JBoss eXo Portal, Spring MVC, ColdFusion, PHP (and PHP applications like Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, etc.), Python (and Django), Javascript/AJAX libraries (GWT, YUI, jQuery, extJS, etc.), Adobe Flex, .NET, among others
- provides excellent support for SEO
- satisfies standards-compliance both from a developer perspective (JAX-RS, JSR-299, JSR-223, JSR-168/286, JSR-170/283, CMIS, etc.) and from a Web designer perspective (W3C standards for XHTML and CSS)
- is built from the ground up for high-performance, high-reliability, and scalability
Based on the success we've had building production systems with Crafter rivet and extending our heritage as an open source innovator, we are now opening it up to the broader community as an open source project.
Who's using Crafter rivet?
Crafter rivet is currently in production and powering enterprise Web properties, portals, and social media applications for companies and sites such as:
- Kaplan (division of the Washington Post Co.) - visit http://kaptest.com
- Harvard Business Publishing - visit http://hbr.org and http://harvardbusiness.org
- HBP's e-commerce site - visit http://store.harvardbusiness.org
- PAETEC Communications - visit http://paetec.com
- Full Sail University - visit http://fullsail.edu
- National Academy of Sciences - visit http://dels.nas.edu
- a startup funded by the Facebook Fund - visit http://apps.facebook.com/connectedweds/
Hundreds of sites are now running Crafter rivet in production and several others are under development for companies that span a variety of vertical markets including consumer services, financial services, consumer product goods, manufacturing, telecom, technology, and media/publishing. In November 2007 we launched kaptest.com - the very first site on Crafter rivet (combined with Alfresco WCM and JBoss Seam). For this highly successful and ground-breaking project, Kaplan and Rivet Logic won the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award in 2008. Then, in 2009 we launched several Harvard Business Publishing Web sites using Alfresco WCM and Crafter rivet, and won the Overall Innovation Award from Alfresco for this implementation, which included the online edition of Harvard Business Review and the entire e-commerce front-end for Harvard Business Digital. And of course we run rivetlogic.com on Crafter rivet too, using PHP for the presentation tier.
While we are just now releasing it and while it's certainly still relatively new, Crafter rivet has already been proven in production environments.
Licensing
Crafter rivet is free and open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.0.
To Learn More...
Visit our FAQ and feel free to contact us with any questions by email - info at rivetlogic dot com.
