equanda history

equanda as a framework has been long in the making. The first ideas and concepts were conceived many years ago, but it took some time before these ideas were mature enough and the opportunity arose to start developing.

In 2003 development started as Uni-d and the sourceforge project was created.

In the original version EJB2 was used for the persistence layer and Cocoon for the presentation. However, it became clear that generating complex forms using Cocoon was far from trivial an thus this was re-evaluted.

The presentation layer was redone from scratch, changing framework from Cocoon to tapestry 3. This proved to be much more productive. About a year and a half later, when the dust settled around the nex version, this was migrated towards tapestry4 to allow using the ajax features which were more easily available there.

At some point, it appeared that there were some problems with the EJB2 implementation which was used in the main projects which applied the principles. As EJB3 was then close to being finalized and it was clear that EJB2 was being abandoned (as in development stopped), so the bold (and too early) move was made to EJB3. This did however have some serious side effects on the value objects which were in use at that time (these value objects are no longer part of equanda). The proxies made their entrance into equanda to fix this and make the framework easier to use.

It did however become clear that Uni-d has some flaws, and as that project is heavily relied on by some other projects, just changing it to make it better was not possible. So mid 2007 a new project, equanda, was created which started with a copy of the Uni-d code base, but which is being cleaned up. Many parts have been removed to make it all more consistent, large bits rewritten to make the code more performant, shorter, cleaner. The end result should make equanda a viable project for the future.

  • 1. equanda history