What is fatwire from programmer perspective?

Question

What open source toolkit does fatwire compare to and are there some particular advantages to fatwire?

How hard is fatwire to export out of and move to a free alternative?

How stable is it as a platform to write java extensions on?

Answer 1

From a development persepective, FatWire can be unfriendly. Having worked on a number of sites using this application it can easy bloat, and become difficult to maintain.

From a user perspective there has been alot of effort in the UI and this has led to a highly functional tool.

From a client perspective all clients bar 1 (a large news agency) were happy with the end result. FatWire can slow when using complex logic to generate menus or breadcumbs for example or when you have a large amount of content. This is the main reason the one client was unhappy. The FatWire site regularily struggled under the load. It sometimes seen as a solution to all web needs.

As such FatWire succeeds in serving Static Content & Semi Dynamic content, but can flounder when forced to do fully dynamic sites (from my experience).

Answer 2

From the original press release:

FatWire Software announced the rollout of FirstSite, which is a set of tools and best practices that helps companies using FatWire Content Server get their first Web site or application running quickly while providing a foundation for future expansion. FirstSite includes a collection of standard templates and site components that are common to most sites, combined with documentation, training, a rich developer community, and best practices methodology. FatWire and its solution partners are using FirstSite as the basis for developing content-centric applications for specific vertical markets. With only minor, cosmetic alterations, developers can use the code in FirstSite to implement a first site, while simultaneously learning how to utilize Content Server's capabilities, such as dynamic content delivery, personalization, caching, and product catalogs.

Firstsite is not a product, unless this has changed since 2004 (unfortunately I cannot look, since their developer site is down). Fatwire's Content Server does not compare to any Open Source CMS that I know. It's scope goes much further. I will answer your questions one by one:

Advantages - There are many (or nobody would buy it, and it is not cheap)

On the delivery side: scalability, fine-grained cache control, stateless servlet architecture, ....

On the back office side: virtually no limit to asset types, dynamic content attributes, find-grained security and access control, ...

On the development side: Intelligently architected API with good coding productivity, tag library, ...

Openness

You cannot easily expect to migrate content between any two CMS products, open source or not. While there are ways to extract contant from the database in XML and other forms, using product tools, or simply at the database level, I don't think that this can be an argument for or against using a particular CMS. Ever tried to migrate from Drupal to Joomla?

Stable

I worked on several Fatwire implementations from 2000 to 2004 (back then it was OpenMarket Content Server, then Divine Content Server). It was stable enough for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the S&P sites, and I would expect stability not to be an issue today.