With the end of life of Joomla 1.5 coming up at the end of the month and the integrated multilingual capabilities that are now available in Joomla 2.5, we feel there is no longer a need for a separate multilingual solution for Joomla.

With the sunset of Nooku Content, we are putting all our focus on growing Nooku as a free and open source web application platform.

As Nooku starts its 5th year, we will slowly leave our Joomla roots behind and wander off into the wider PHP galaxy. Exciting times!

But first, the tool that speaks your language is bidding adieu and we thank all our partners who helped us build Nooku Content.

In the past 4 years, we got glorified, and vilified. We pursued a vision, challenged the status quo, received praise, above all, we kept to our principles and make good things happen.

Beyond Joomla!

As we start year 5, Nooku will slowly leave its Joomla roots behind and wander off into the wider PHP galaxy.

Let’s face it,  Joomla is moving ahead, but progresses slowly. We love Joomla and we want it to thrive. We believed that Nooku could make this happen and so did some of you, but the time has come to move on.

In 2013, and with the release of 13.1, the Nooku Platform will run fully standalone. A release we are very much looking forward to. The PHP community is innovating at a fast pace and we want to be at the forefront, helping to evolve the web and continuously growing Nooku as a free and open source web application platform.

We recognize that for some, change is difficult. But this is technology! It’s the fastest game in the world! As a long time Joomla community member and Nooku Rock Star,  Torkil Johnsen said:

“You have to chase and embrace innovation to stay in the game, not demand that it comes over to shine your shoes.”

Blossoming community

Four years ago, we were not much more than a handful of people with a vision. Today, Nooku is:

• an active team of 12 people
• 500 subscribers in the developer’s discussion group
• hundreds of websites powered by Nooku Server and Nooku Framework

We’ve been out there a lot as well.

• We presented Nooku on many Joomladays in all corners of the world.
• We co-organized more than 10 Nooku Jams with our partners.

Code metrics are not a good measurement for the size or quality of a project, but they do help to indicate progress. In our official repositories, we have:

• 4650 commits for Nooku Framework
• 3600 commits for Nooku Server
• 1650 commits for Nooku Components

In the past 4 years more than 30 developers have contributed code to Nooku. Thanks You !

Party rock!

In true Nooku tradition, we party! Join us in Nooku Jam Leuven to celebrate Nooku’s birthday. Party hard and learn more about the Nooku Platform and roadmap. The event is taking place on the 16-17th of May 2012 at the FlandersDC Creativity Lab in Leuven, BE.

Nooku’ers from all over will come together for two days of mind blowing presentations, discussions, brainstorms, workshops, and hackathons around specific areas of the Nooku project and of course, to celebrate 4 great years of Nooku magic.

Happy 4th Birthday Nooku!

Expect two days of presentations, discussions, brainstorms, workshops, and hackathons around specific areas of the Nooku project on May 16 and 17 at the FlandersDC Creativity Lab in Leuven, BE.

Checkout the video for impressions from last year’s Nooku Jam Leuven. Fun, fun and more fun awaits this year’s participants!

Join us in this creative and innovative Nooku event. Register today!

Share and collaborate

A Nooku Jam is an open, participatory workshop-event, whose content is provided by participants. The concept is very similar to a barcamp. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from the attendees.

No spectators, only participants.

Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. Participants won’t need to decide what to talk about until they get there. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen.

All about community

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join a Nooku Jam. When you come, be prepared to share with other attendees. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

Sign up for Nooku Jam 12.2 Leuven today!

Once again Nookuers from all over will come together. Expect lot’s of fun and two days of mind blowing presentations, discussions, brainstorms, workshops, and hackathons around specific areas of the Nooku project.

Nooku Jam Leuven 2011 Highlights

Check out the some of the photo highlights and insights from last year’s Jam.

This jam (was) followed the more informal barcamp format, which relies on spontaneous input by all the attendants. The attendants were to come up with their own ideas for talks, along with things they would like to hear about. These poles of ideas were quickly refactored into walls of ideas. – Moyoweb

While the other events that I have been to always left me a little exhausted, I left this one feeling inspired and motivated. I’m looking forward to work with all the great guys around Nooku in the future and am excited about all the stuff that is coming up. – David Deutsch

Sign up for Nooku Jam 12.2 Leuven today!

What is a Nooku Jam?

A Nooku Jam is an open, participatory workshop-event, whose content is provided by participants. The concept is very similar to a barcamp. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from the attendees.

Nooku Jams are never your traditional conferences – they are more of an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.  Anybody can speak on any topic that they are passionate about. For Nooku developers, this means their latest code, component, or mini project.

There are no spectators, only participants.

Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. Participants won’t need to decide what to talk about until they get there. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen.

The day starts with the session suggestions. Everybody describes the kind of session they can do. Then the session gets pinned on the board for a certain time slot. After the planning – voila – there is a schedule and the sessions start.

It’s always about community

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join a Nooku Jam. When you come, be prepared to share with other attendees. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

The jam is the perfect event for Nooku magic offline! Register today, we only have 30 seats available.

Sticking to our new 4 month release cycle we officially tagged Nooku 12.1 (/tags/12.1) in all our repositories on the Nooku Developer Portal. At the same time, we also moved the 12.2 release in the trunk (/trunk) and started the development of 12.3 (/branches/development).

A stable first release

This first release is mostly a maintenance release. Lots of bugs and issues discovered after the last alpha have been fixed. We also focussed on making sure that Nooku Framework is fully compatible with all Joomla versions up to 2.5.x.

The 1200 commits made by not less than 12 rockstar developers from all over the world show how dedicated our community is to making Nooku solid and useable in a production environment. Thanks everyone!

Divided by 12 weeks, that’s an average of 108 commits/week or 21 commits a day. Not bad for ‘only’ a maintenance release!

Full list of changes:

• Nooku Server 12.1 milestone
• Nooku Framework 12.1 milestone
• Nooku Components 12.1 milestone

Backwards compatibility

There is no backwards compatibility between releases. The changes between the 12.1 and alpha versions have been documented on the wiki.

• Nooku Framework changelog

If you are using Nooku Framework for public/commercial Joomla components, remember that you MUST update to 12.1! We will find you if you don’t ;)

What is happening next?

With the 12.1 release out the door, our focus has now shifted to the testing and stabilisation of 12.2 (/trunk) and development of 12.3 (/branches/development). Work in trunk and development is done at the same time. This means the release of 12.2 is planned for May/June, while 12.3 will be released in Sep/Oct.

If you are using Nooku for your project, you can either contribute features to 12.3 or you can help with the testing and stabilizing of the 12.2 release.

If you are getting to know Nooku and you have questions, feel free to jump into our #Nooku IRC channel for a chat.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a real time communication platform with millions of users and is also extensively used by developers. IRC is supported and used by many open source projects to help developers communicate and collaborate.

To access the Nooku channel, you will need an IRC client. For some of the more noteworthy clients, we have come up with a list for you to check out. Point your client to connect to  irc.nooku.org on port 6667 and then type /join #Nooku or simply go to irc://irc.nooku.org

Clients

Windows

• mIRC: http://www.mirc.com
• HydraIRC: http://www.hydrairc.com
• XChat: http://xchat.org/windows
• DMDirc: http://www.dmdirc.com

*nix

• XChat: http://xchat.org
• DMDirc: http://www.dmdirc.com
• Smuxi: http://www.smuxi.org

OS X

• XChat Azure (app store)
• Colloquy: http://colloquy.info
• Linkinus (app store)

/join us in #Nooku today, join the conversation and start collaborating with the many talented developers in the Nookusphere!

An often asked question on the Nooku Framework mailing list is how to deal with relations in databases. Nooku Framework doesn’t support relations out of the box yet, but fortunately the InnoDB engine in MySQL does!

There are three important rules that must be met in order to create relations:

1. Both tables must be InnoDB tables and must not be TEMPORARY tables.
2. Keys must have similar internal data types.
3. Both foreign and referenced keys need to be indexed.

A basic example

Let’s see the basics through an example:

Assume that we have an articles table with two columns: article_id and title. We have an authors table as well with the columns: author_id and name. Here is the SQL code for the tables:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `articles` (
`article_id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`title` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
PRIMARY KEY (`article_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARACTER SET=utf8;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `authors` (
`author_id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
PRIMARY KEY (`author_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARACTER SET=utf8;

We want to assign authors to articles. An author can belong to more than one articles, and an article can belong to more than one authors. So this is a many-to-many relation. That’s why we need a relation table too, which has article_id and author_id columns:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `articles_authors` (
`article_id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
`author_id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
FOREIGN KEY (`article_id`)
REFERENCES `articles`(`article_id`)
ON DELETE CASCADE,
FOREIGN KEY (`author_id`)
REFERENCES `authors`(`author_id`)
ON DELETE RESTRICT
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARACTER SET=utf8;

As you can see, we specified the foreign keys with CASCADE and RESTRICT options. Let’s try to delete an article. Notice that relations in the articles_authors table are deleted with it automatically. Now let’s try to remove an author. If the author is referenced in the relation table, then MySQL refuses to delete it. This ensures referential integrity.

Keeping referential integrity

By using InnoDB, you can prevent accidental removal of referenced rows. Other than its roboust data management features, it has usability advantages too. For example some of the database management tools support foreign keys too. For example in Sequel Pro, an arrow is displayed next to the column’s value, and it takes you to the referenced row when you click on it. This little feature can be useful many times.

InnoDB has become the default engine in MySQL 5.5 and has many features over MyISAM. I am highly recommending every developer to consider using it in their applications.

This was just a basic introduction to foreign keys, it is capable of much more! If you are interested, visit the MySQL Reference Manual.

The beginning of every new year gives pause for both retrospective and prospective thought. We celebrate the new year as we take a look back at the year that was and get a glimpse of the year that will be.

Looking back at the year that was

Creativity, Innovation and Inspiration – three words I will remember best from 2011. The platitude “hard work pays off” rang true this past year with the great work done in our little project.  Nooku development literally moved ahead at warp-speed in 2011.

Growing the Nooku Platform

• Nooku Framework grew to an awesome RESTful framework for web development and especially for rapid development of powerful custom Joomla solutions.
• Nooku Server. We saw the birth of Nooku Server, a multi-site web application platform. Based on lightened core of Joomla 1.5 and optimised for performance and scalability.
• Nooku Components. Lot’s of innovation happened with the development of new re-usable components: com_files, com_activities, com_debug, com_groups, …

The recent Nooku Jam Leuven can be easily summed up in 2 words – incredibly inspiring!

Twenty six attendees discussed, collaborated and shared ideas on the 26th and 27th of November at the FlandersDC Creativity Lab in Leuven, Belgium. The Jam, sponsored by Moyoweb, Beyounic and Timble, was an inspiring weekend for the Nooku community.

The recipe : great ideas, creative people, lots of food and Belgian beer and an inspiring venue! Check the photostream of David Deutsch for the evidence of the inspiring weekend.

Looking Back

One of the rules of the Nooku Jam is : “You blog about the Jam” and that’s exactly what some of the jammers did.

Moyoweb

Our friends from Moyoweb talked about the format of the event.

This jam (was) followed the more informal barcamp format, which relies on spontaneous input by all the attendants. The attendants were to come up with their own ideas for talks, along with things they would like to hear about. These poles of ideas were quickly refactored into walls of ideas.

Kudos to FlandersDC and their awesome creativity lab that truly deserves its name. The open space and artificial grass gave the participants a fresh perspective and allowed their creative juices to flow!

Torkil Johnsen

Torkil Johnsen also shared his thoughts on collaboration and code sharing during some of the talks.

Plenty of sessions this weekend concerned code and code collaboration. With the number of developers increasing more and more, it’s become obvious that we on some parts are duplicating our efforts. Without a central place to share code between ourselves, or at least a place to get an overview of where collaboration is happening, it’s hard for developers to join forces on mutually beneficial projects.

Peter Raeves

On Sunday afternoon, lightning talks were held about applications, tools, and services people use to help them in getting their work done. Each participant got 2 minutes to show his fave tool. Peter Raeves compiled the list and shared it on his blog.

David Deutsch

Adding more to his  ”Making Nerds Look Good” photos, David Deutsch wrote the following on his personal blog :

While the other events that I have been to always left me a little exhausted, I left this one feeling inspired and motivated. I’m looking forward to work with all the great guys around Nooku in the future and am excited about all the stuff that is coming up.

Looking forward

We had an awesome year of Nooku Jams. Big kudos to all of the participants and sponsors for your involvement, participation and dedication to making Nooku Jams really great and inspiring events.

Torkil said it best when he wrote:

.. The best thing to do for now is to keep an ear to the ground and listen for #Nooku, because there’s a stampede coming.

Watch out for more Jams and community fun in 2012!

Following up on the success of the first Asian Nooku Jam in Manila last September 2010. This year’s jam, was held in the heart of one of Metro Manila’s CBDs – Ortigas, where we were kindly given the run of the TechBar in the headquarters of Exist Software Labs.

Jammers from all over

Demonstrating the global reach of Nooku, two of our Jammers hailed from the foothills of the gods – Nepal.  Nischal Pradhan, founder and CEO of a software development firm in Nepal that utilizes Nooku technology, was in Manila when he found out that Mr. Nooku himself was going to be in town, he and some of his team, jumped at the chance to be part of the Jam.

The other 13 Jammers were local Filipino IT professionals mainly working for private commercial companies and the academe.

Sticky notes

The Jam kicked off with a free form sticky note session, where participants wrote questions and ideas they were interested to find out about Nooku. The sticky notes were then posted on a whiteboard and Johan used this to structure the agenda for the day – very unconference style!

Keep it DRY, Shy, and Tell the other Guy

After a hearty lunch break, the afternoon segment of the Jam delved more deeply into the code itself, looking into the very nuts and bolts of the framework and how to leverage its ‘magic’.

Part of this involved a session led by Israel Canasa that examined the com_activities component he is working on. Rael talked about the philosophy of activity streams giving a real world insight into how Nooku can be used to power development.

Prost!!!

As always appropriate after a whole day of Jamming, a good meal and liquid refreshments ;) are called for. So the Nooku team and a few of the Jammers had dinner at a local Filipino resto to share insights in a more social atmosphere.  A perfect way to end a highly productive day.

Vision to Architecture

The Prezi used by Johan to present the vision of Nooku that led to the creation of the architecture behind the framework is available online here.

Thank you sponsors!

The Nooku Jam would not have been possible without the generous support of this year’s sponsors: Exist Software Labs, 168 Media Creative, 98 Labs and Timble

For more pictures check out the Nooku Jam Manila set on Flickr.