Matt is BACK!!

Hmm.. OpenEdit must be more exciting than airplanes. Ok, so that can't be true. I love airplanes. I have my private pilots license and my flying career highlight is a supersonic full after burner dive towards to the Atlantic ocean in the back of an F18 fighter jet that included a 7.1G pull out. Exciting isn't a strong enough word to describe that moment in my life. Given my limited vocabulary, I'll just say that this was one of the most exciting things I've ever done and leave it at that.

But this post isn't about me. It's about Matt Avery who Chris Burkey describes as 'one of the original architects of OpenEdit'. And Matt is BACK!

Then why the reference to airplanes? With the return of Matt Avery to the development team, OpenEdit now has two aerospace engineers turned web developer on staff. Matt has a Master of Science in Aeronautical and Astronautical engineering from Ohio State and has worked for over 4 years doing thermal analysis on gas turbine engines as a consultant for General Electric. He also has years of experience programming with Chris Burkey, dating back to their days together at eInnovation, a consultancy that was owned and operated by Chris years ago.

Here's a little history of OpenEdit from Matt, beginning with their work together at the start of the millenium.

During that time, Chris first developed the "Builder" application, which was a database driven website builder, for a graphics design company to use in building a huge training website.  When he added the "through the web" editing feature, he knew he had something.  The next incarnation of the application was loosely based on an open source project called JPublish and was called "WSPublisher" which stood for Web Services Publisher.  The problem with WSPublisher was that it was way ahead of its time.  It preceded the current Services Oriented Architecture / Enterprise Service Bus buzzword craze by at least 2 to 3 years.  No one could understand what it was doing, but fundamentally it was a framework to enable developers to use web services to build web applications -- which is what everyone is doing (or trying to do) with SOA these days.

Many concepts were added to the application along the way and we finally got to Open Edit around the 3.0 days.  One of the major concepts we were trying to support was the idea of "modules" which you now know as "openedit-cart", "openedit-archive", "openedit-blog", etc.  The problem was that we were using a home grown XML configuration scheme and it looked like a lot more coding was required to support module plugins. Along comes the Spring project and the dependency injection buzz.  Open Edit 4.0 was a complete architecture rewrite of the Open Edit core to enable plugin functionality using Spring and incorporate the use of the repository interface instead of accessing files directly.  I wrote the 4.0 core in secret during November and December of 2004 and sprung it on Chris as a Christmas present.  I thought of OE 4.0 as a development branch (a "spike" or science experiment), so I was fairly well shocked when Chris adopted it immediately and made it work in production (not without sweat and tears).  That was a huge commitment and undertaking on his part and at least as much work, if not more, than the rewrite of the core.

Now we are nearing the release of 6.0 and it kind of blows my mind how successful it has been.  I keep telling Chris I want him to make a billion dollars with it and take over the web because, hey, who doesn't want to have a close friend that's a powerful billionaire?

From all of us at OpenEdit, welcome back Matt. Your positive impact is already noticeable within all the projects you touch.