Johan's blog
Popfolio site launched.
It's been exactly three years since we delivered our first dating platform with LodgON. On February 14, 2005, the For2 dating site was launched. Actually, For2 was our first "big community site". We haven't worked at the site for about 2 years now, but I think the functionality would still fit in a modern dating site.
Things have evolved, since. Today, Poppunt has launched the Popfolio site. On the Popfolio site, musicians, artists, designers,... can hook up with each other and become friends or (business) partners.
The Popfolio site is created with DaliCMS . It is a good example about how web-sites are evolving into community-sites. An increasing number of todays websites offers the end-user at least the possibility to "do something personal" with the site. One of the cool things about DaliCMS is that it is very easy to integrate user-properties (dooh, I should call this "user-generated content") into regular web-pages.
This is the way DaliCMS and I believe a number of other systems are taking. The user is getting more focus when building websites. Content is important, but the user is King.
There are some major differences between the current Popfolio dating site and the sites we created years ago. One of these differences is performance. Today, if you use the Java EE 5 specifications in a clever way, performance is really "under control". One of the major differences is that we don't have to convert object 3 times between database and website. The same User entity that exists in the Persistence Layer (using Toplink in our case, the default implementation in Glassfish) is being used in the JSP's using JSTL. Combine that with some intelligent (and sometimes project-specific) caching in the web-container, and there you go.
Congratulations to Poppunt, the Popfolio site is attracting a big audience at its first day!
