Free Choice of Technology
The architecture of Hippo CMS differs from that of most other CMSes, in that does not restrict you in your choice of technology or framework to implement your front end application or web site. As long as you can talk WebDAV with the repository, you are fine. And although we prefer Cocoon to build Hippo CMS driven web sites ourselves, it cannot be denied that Cocoon has a steep learning curve, which frightens off a lot of people. There is no reason though why you should not use *your* framework of choice. Wander already showed this with his experimental JSF repository browser. Now Matthew Brooks, Technical Architect for RDF Group, describes the architecture of the online mortgage search and application service they built. One paragraph caught my eye:
We selected the Dutch based Hippo CMS system and built integration between echo 2 and Hippo CMS. Briefly we built a component that could display XHTML fragments (we could have used the one from echopointNG but in the end built our own) and the data to be displayed is pulled from Hippo using DASL.
A nice example of the flexibility that Hippo CMS provides to integrate with any web application framework, in this case Echo2.
If you want to integrate your preferred framework with Hippo CMS, all you need to know is WebDAV. If your framework is Java based, this page is a good starting point. You also may want to take a look at the experimental Webdav Client Library (also from Wander).