Multi-lingual content manager for Joomla! - Nooku

Jamming in Rotterdam with Nooku

On Saturday, 11 December 2010 Joomla integrators and PHP developers gathered in Rotterdam, NL for the first Dutch Nooku Jam.

The jam, perfectly organized by Nooku community member Herman Peeren, was completely focused on Nooku Framework. Nooku is hot! This was once again demonstrated by the speed at which registrations for the event came in! For some people it was their first encounter with Nooku Framework, for others it was a great way to finally meet fellow Nooku community members face to face.

In the morning lead architect Johan Janssens gave a general introduction of the Nooku Framework. Johan explained how the framework was born, how development is done and how the community is getting involved. He also explained the vision for the future and not to forget what benefits Nooku brings to Joomla extension development.

Child’s play

In the afternoon Babs Gösgens showed in her presentation titled “Child’s play” how you can create a fully workable Joomla extension with only a few lines of code.

She explained that if you make sure that your database table and file directory structure are following proper conventions you only need a few lines of code to make it work. All the “standard” code needed for example the toolbar, the CRUD, etc is already dealt with by Nooku Framework for you.

To accomplish this Nooku makes clever use of a “default” concept. Nooku provides you with a com_default, mod_default and plg_default extensions which you extend and specialise to suit your needs. For a basic extension like com_helloworld specialising com_default only requires a few lines of code and you have a fully workable extension, complete with database delete, insert and update support.

This perfectly demonstrates one of the many benefits of using Nooku Framework. It drastically speeds up and eases development. You can now just focus on what matters most, adding features.

Lego Technic

These benefits increase even more when you start to develop multiple extensions. The percentage of code you need will decrease exponentially! Johan refers to this as the “lego technic” effect. Nooku Framewok doesn’t only allow you to create extensions with less code it also allows you to re-use your own code and that of others everywhere and anywhere.

To quote Johan : “Why build 10 CCK’s that are about 80% the same? Why not create a common base that all CCK’s can extend from” Today, Joomla has about 6500 extensions. Imagine what would happen if you could reduce the overal codebase of those 6500 extensions by 80% and make the resulting 20% extremely re-usable. With Nooku Framework we can and it works!

A re-usable tagging and versioning component are already in the works that demonstrate the “lego technic” principle.

Do it yourself?

If, after reading the above information, you want to get started yourself with Nooku Framework, you can! Go to  www.nooku.org/framework to find out more. You can also request access to the mailing list. If you are serious to get into Nooku definitely also request access to the mailing list, people on the list are very helpful to you get started.

Nice inspiring day!

At the end of the day a few of the Jammers showed some of the Nooku projects they are working on and we ended the day with a Q&A session.

Everybody got a nice Nooku Rotterdam Jam T-shirts and after taking a group picture we headed of into Rotterdam for some great Chinese food. A great finale to a fun and inspiring day!

Thanks to Herman, Johan and Tom! More pictures of the Nooku Jam can be found on Flickr.

Cross-posted and translated from: http://www.joomlacommunity.eu/