Yesterday we released the OpenSAGA website to the public. What’s the buzz about? It’s about a Java- and Spring-based web framework for which I am the project lead and principal architect and which is going to be released to the public in the first half of 2010. Let me tell you some more details…
SAGA is a governmental guideline in Germany covering the architecture, methods and technologies to be used in e-government applications. SAGA is thought to be an open standard but up to now it has been living in a kind of secluded environment, mostly because a small circle of experts has been growing the standard.
The SAGA standard is relevent for anyone working for governmental IT projects… sometimes more, sometimes less. One of the most observable standards enforced are the regulations about accessibility… quite a challenge in the Web 2.0 world when everyone is clamoring for shiny funky applications and you as the developer need to make the application work, when neither CSS nor JavaScript are available, too. Try that with your home applications 
Therefore we at QuinScape started to work on the OpenSAGA framework in 2007. OpenSAGA is a Java- and Spring-based framework that used a model driven approach in order to generate complex web applications from XML based models. Technology is almost completely abstracted out of your code, the generator and the runtime choose the best available technology in order to turn your intentions into running code. This e.g. allows the developer to not even waste one second on questions like “what is my AJAX auto-suggest going to to when JavaScript is turned off or how is my dynamic tree widget going to work?”. The OpenSAGA framework does this (among many other things) for you.
The time suddenly available then can be spend to focus on the business problems at hand which again are described with high level models. And there is more to come… but I don’t want to get ahead of the OpenSAGA website… let’s just say that we at QuinScape are very excited about this brand new framework.
And best of all: It’s going to be open source. Thus even non-government companies can profit from the energy and money spent by government (and spent in such amounts as only the goverment can) and gain a competitive advantage for commercial web applications.
Just stay tuned to the blog at the OpenSAGA website… starting in January 2010 we are going to issue a steady stream of news about the OpenSAGA project culminating in the release party on the 1st of May, 2010.
