I've started this little doc to capture some of the Rainbow Goals that have been discussed explicitly, or implicitly, in the developer mailing list. The content in this document is not an official statement of policy or thought, its just a collection place for recent discussions. Hopefully someday it will evolve into a mission/vision type statement for Rainbow.
Who's using Rainbow
Typical Rainbow users can be classified into the following groups:
Developers/providers/consultants who need to create new websites
fairly often and quickly, and who benefit from investing time into
creating trusted modules, templates and style sheets that they can
re-use or modify quickly.
Users who are creating a content-driven site that
will be delivering either frequently changing content or large volumes
of content and must, of necessity, invest the time and energy into a
robust portal technology. (And probably have a larger pool of content
contributors who need to be enabled for posting of content.)
Community or Store-front developers and users who, for specific
reasons, can't do what they need to do with other alternatives or choose
to avoid the minimal costs (or have time to spare versus cost
considerations).
Developers/hobbyists/students who want to learn ASP.NET
technologies and want a lab for developing in ASP.NET, just enjoy it,
etc.
Design Goals
The design goals for Rainbow are largely driven by the core developers who spend 15-60 hours each week working on Rainbow.
1) A commercial content mangement system
There are several impications to this statement, notably:
- must support web farms - i.e a highly-scalable collection of servers
- must support data persistence that works ina web farm - storing data in files doesn't scale well accross web farms unless it is read-only data. Similarly, we don't support MS Access becuase it doesn't scale across multiple servers.
More to come :)