Private forum

Hello there,

I've been evaluating JForum for the last weeks and even though it is a very good piece of software and a good port of phpBB, I'm afraid it does not suit our needs and I'll be creating another instance.
As I say, not because JForum is not good, but because our forum has to have other requirements and in some cases it mas more than what we need .

In our case we need to be a half private/ half public forum where the registration of private users is done outside the forum and authentication is external to the forum database. We need to hide the username of the users login in the forum (showing a descriptive name instead) as that username will be shared with other applications and is considered security sensitive information. Profiles also don't have to be updatable, as this information comes from another source. We also don't need avatars, rankings and some other features that even though very nice to have in a public forum, they have no place in the kind of forum we need. And some other details like that.

So, in the end it would have been so much "refactoring" that it would have ended up being a fork of JForum and we did not want to do that. Not that I enjoy re-doing the wheel again also :?

In any case, we would like to thank you for having JForum available so we could evaluate it and I hope we can contribute back something of what we do.

Kind regards,
D.
[originally posted on jforum.net by GreenEyed]

Well, looks like that much of the work is to *remove* code, not to add ;).

See, JForum has already a stable code base, and working with it is far from difficult. Also, there is security option to disable users to register and even log in in the system, as well a handful set of permission control options. Moreover, there is interfaces and example codes related to SSO and customized login authenticators.

When I started coding JForum, I thought I could do it - with almost all features, excluding private messages - in no more than 3 months. Well, it took at least 3 times (not full time coding of course, but you got the ideia).

Some time ago I heard about some other guys who was making they own java forum, most because they didn't want to help me (dumb excuses from their part). They were saying that they could do it very quickly...
Of course, the software from those guys is some kind of piece of &*@ and they're very late too.

So, is not that I'm discouraging you, not at all. I just think that using JForum as a start may be better for you and, many times, for JForum itself - since you guys may contribute with some improvements.

Well, that's all. Let me know what do you think.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

Well, it's not, of course, that we don't want to help you, I hope that is clear enough from the JIRA issues, along with the solutions, that I already posted ;), but the problem here is time & features related.

We need initally, and soon, a basic set of features, and some of them JForum still does not have and some are still in the CVS not-so-stable version, and we don't need a whole set of others that are there. So in order to have it we would need to implement some features from scratch and then disable many others withouth breaking the basic functionality, while learning how JForum internally works, not that difficult I must agree ;)..

Even though JForums basic architecture is relatevely simple to grasp, our team is already fluent with another, we use Hibernate and XSLT, and we already have our own set of tools, like an Hibernate POJO generator from the database schema and/or several XSLT templates we use & re-use...

In short, to be able to use JForum for our purposes and contribute back we would need more time than what we will need to write our own limited version with the tools & architecture we are already familiar with. And unfortunately in this case we are short in time. :?

Once we don't have to hurry that much I hope we can contribute back, then with more time, some of the things we do for ours.

I do develop web applications for a living, so I'm not taking this decission lightly and/or willingly.

Cheers!
[originally posted on jforum.net by GreenEyed]

I see . Well, stay connected, anyway. Is nice to talk to you

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

Thanks, nice to talk to you too. JForum is, from what I've seen, a nice piece of software and the installation and clarity of code is something you don't see often in open source. I was able to find some of the issues I was having after just a couple of hours of playing with the source and as I said, it is more a matter of "we are in a hurry" than anything else.

If you ever decide to go the Hibernate route, I would recommend first to declare the foreign keys explicitely and you can declare them to be nullable if you have "chicken-or-egg-first" conflicts like in the topic-post relationship. Why start with FKs? Because afterwards you can use reverse-engineering mappers that will create the "Hibernate Beans" for you automatically, as well as the descriptors. If you have the FKs defined they will create the relationships as well, and that saves tons of work of handwriting error-prone descriptors and/or xdoclet javadoc comments.

That's what we use so we let Hibernate take care of the different syntax of each DB .

So if you ever decide to go this route, I'll be happy to help where I can. After all, I'm one of the JavaTools community leaders, where JForum is hosted, so it's almost my "duty" . As an off-topic... are you going to be able to go to JavaOne to the Java.Net booth to talk about JForum? It would be a real nice opportunity to get some exposure and maybe contributors... and moreover, I'll be there so we can meet in person .

Cheers!
[originally posted on jforum.net by GreenEyed]