First of all, what is a Content Management System?

A Content Management System, or CMS for short, is an application designed to facilitate the creation and management of content.

So, do you need a CMS?

Whether or not you may need a CMS solution depends on the size of your website, the amount of traffic you receive, your skills as a webmaster, the number of users who will be adding content to the website, and many other factors.

Website Size

The content of a large website can be very difficult and tedious to maintain if a content management system is not used. Most CMS solutions will store the content in a database in an organized fashion. The administration interface of the CMS should provide an easy way to manage the content.

On the other hand, a CMS solution for a small website may be overkill. A website with a small number of pages is easy to maintain, but may need a content management system solution as it grows.

Website Traffic

The amount of traffic a website receives can be a significant factor in deciding whether or not to use a CMS. Static html pages have always been the fastest loading, whereas dynamic pages need to be compiled or pull information from a database. The processing behind these operations can add time to the loading of the page. It is important to consider the amount of processing that takes place behind the scenes in a content management system. Fortunately, there are many lightweight CMS solutions these days for high traffic websites.

Webmaster Technical Skills

A content management system can be an easy solution for a webmaster who lacks the necessary skill set to create their own website. Most CMS solutions contain a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The editor allows for the creation of website content without HTML or other website specific knowledge.

There are many templates available which can be easily installed in many content management systems. Some of these templates are free and some come with a small cost. Another solution to creating the look for your website would be to hire a website designer. This can come with a significant cost, but you'd be getting the exact look and feel you want for your website.

Website Users

In many situations, a website will have more than one content provider. In this case, it may be beneficial to consider a content management solution, as a good CMS system will have the ability check in and check out content. The purpose of check in and check out is to prevent more than one user from editing the same content at the same time. Multiple users on a static website can create many problems with content updates without the help of a CMS system.

Conclusions

There are certainly other factors to consider in whether or not to use a content management system, but hopefully the information contained above will help you in making an informed decision.

Some working knowledge of J2EE or JSF is assumed for this article.

Like some of you I've been frustrated with this technology known as JSF or Java Server Faces. There are several different flavors out there that are built on the shoulders of JSF. For instance Oracle's ADF (Application Development Framework). Oracle ADF Faces Components is a set of over a 100 JSF components that let you build a richer user interface for your Java EE applications. Oracle ADF Faces also includes many of the framework features most needed by JSF developers today.

That is great, and in many ways it will make life easier to develop in a JSF environment. Some items you will find available in these "add on" packages have a real benefit. For instance, as of the date of this article, I was very surprised that a File Upload is a feature still not implemented in JSF in respect to using natural jsf tags. There are ways to accomplish this task in JSF but they are not native JSF approaches. The process is a "no brainer" in just about every other framework available today, including asp.net.

Another simple task (I thought) was having a data table present the results of a query in an editable format. Possibly to update a user record or shopping cart. After working in other technologies it was very efficient to return a result set to a data table object and let that object take care of some of the trivial behaviors and characteristics of the table itself. When I started exploring JSF I was frequently and at every turn becoming more and more frustrated in trying to duplicate some of the most basic of processes similar to managing records through data tables.

There are not a whole lot of resources out there yet on JSF although it is growing steadily, and I found that all too often the resources that I was finding on the internet either didn't apply to the more simple tasks or the information was just completely wrong. One example of that was that it was stated in one article I read that you cannot use command buttons inside of a JSF data table. The recommendation was to use JSF hyperlinks instead when trying to perform an action from a data table due to a bug in the framework that prevented command button actions to fire if the button resided inside of a data table.

At first I thought "you've got to be kidding me"! Then I remembered that I've been finding a fair amount of "bogus" information in regards to JSF development so I decided to do further research and discovered that information to be less than accurate as well.

I simply had to find a way to populate a data table through a result set and get a command button to fire an action and pass all of the data in the data table to the backing bean to update the record. Multiple command buttons would exist as well as hidden fields pertaining to id numbers and so forth. Pretty basic stuff and we've all done it before with relative ease.

It turned out that the solution was in fact a simple one. "Binding". You've heard about it and read about it. But this approach was something a little different as far as I could find.

Many of the blogs and articles that I read dealt with passing the values as parameters and following the steps to define the parameters in faces.config files etc., then retrieving the parameters in a backing bean. Processing the passed data required another set of procedures to utilize mapping to each of the field parameters passed and then processing could begin.

That seemed like a whole heck of a lot to me just to retrieve form data. Then it occurred to me that I should be able to "bind" a text field component on a page to a backing bean. Once it is bound then all I have to do is extract the data. And that's all there is to it. My query returned results and pre-populated a data table including text fields with the values of the query pre-populated in the text fields.

Each one of those text fields was bound to a "HtmlInputText" type in my backing bean. It was not a String type like other approaches define. Doing that does require you to map parameters and populate that String variable through your set methods once the form is submitted.

What I found is that if I bind my text field to a property of text field type that it solved my problem of passing values from a data table, and I didn't have to define parameter fields anywhere in any xml file. Now that I had that figured that out I needed to figure out how to get the value of that property that I've bound my form field to, well why not getValue()?

I personally hadn't seen any examples online or in books for retrieving the value from a form binding it to the type of form element it was and simply use the getValue() to pull out the value of the object. Used like this getParameterFromForm().getValue().

Let me clarify that I am NOT saying that trying this approach isn't documented anywhere, I find it hard to believe that I've had some stroke of genius that no one has had before in the world of java, especially since I'm coming from .NET and ColdFusion.

After doing that I no longer had any problems passing form data to my backing bean. I was able to dynamically populate data tables with any number of records including any number of command buttons within that data table and I didn't have to concern myself with remembering to define parameters in any other areas of the application.

So put simply you can bind your form fields to properties of the same type in your backing bean, and then extract the value of that object using getValue() if you prefer over utilizing parameter string mapping and similar approaches for processing form data. I found it to be easier and less time consuming which has costs associated to it as well.

'Fully integrated' is a term used to describes websites that are progressive enough to include virtually every form of online media in their web presence.

If you look at sites like Yahoo, Forbes and virtually any of the major television network sites you can gain some idea of what I am taking about.

These sites contain either news of blog information. They also contain original video streaming sources and audio streams including podcasts. These sites tend to subscribe to the idea that the web user wants it all and should be able to find it all when they visit the business site.

A fully integrated site will often use flash or other animated or moving text. The interesting dynamic is that the best of these sites understand navigation and ease of use remains a critical concern for guests.

Forbes, for example is highly adept at slideshow type presentations on a multitude of topics. It could be top selling cars, entertainers, vacation hot spots, etc. These slideshows are optimized for search engines and are easy to breeze through.

It seems as if a site like this has the potential to garner some of the same consumers of media that have been courted mostly by network television or traditional newsprint.

Most fully integrated sites did not start off that way. In most cases they worked through issues they could easily address and then added features as their knowledge and confidence grew in relation to the their site development skills.

That's something I have always suggested. Do the best you can at developing a site with the most comprehensive development techniques at your disposal. That doesn't mean you have to have a fully integrated site in order to conduct business, but it does mean that you do not simply wipe your brow, release a sigh and suggest to yourself that your work is finished.

The truth is there are more skills in online web development that are being released than ever before. More programs are working with each other allowing a new robust platform for online use. The role of online web development is an ever changing - ever growing function in relation to how you manage your site and in the use of the most effective marketing tools available.

Many sites will develop an internal compass that provides the date they want to upgrade the website to include new functions. In essence they treat their website like software developers treat upgrades. Some will even go so far as to indicate their website has gone from version 1.0 to version 1.1 or 1.5. The idea is to challenge their own thinking in relation to developing a website even after the website has been launched.

This has the potential of keeping visitors interested in finding out what improvements you will come up with next.

Perhaps the greatest development rule of thumb is that you should always strive to be more integrated by attempting to meet the real and perceived expectations of your site visitors. This mentality will always give you a new goal line in your race for the perfect business.