FAQ: Questions & Answers

General questions

Why is Tiny Marbles different compared to other CMS solutions?

Of course there are already many other content management solutions on the market, sometimes as Open Source, and sometimes you have to pay a licence fee. But either these solutions are big portal solutions with only basic or inconvenient CMS features, or great CMS tools but with no support building complex web application in an easy and intuitive way. We follow another approach, we try to offer great CMS features with an intuitive user interface, but at the same time a web application framework to extend the CMS features for the requirements of complex web applications. Therefore you can include your own web application moduls seemlessly into the Tiny Marbles environment.

Is Tiny Marbles a free software?

Yes, the community version of Tiny Marbles is free. Tiny Marbles is released under the Apache License 2.0 and you can use it for any software project you write. We offer an enterprise version where we provide services around Tiny Marbles. However, for the enterprise version of Tiny Marbles a licence fee will be required. If you have questions about the enterprise licence, please get in touch with us.

Where can I send a question?

On the bottom of every page in this website, or in our Forum. The development team tries to answer as quick as possible.

Do I get support for my projects based on Tiny Marbles?

If you have questions regarding Tiny Marbles itself please contact us, and we try to answer as quick as possible. But specific questions or help for your projects we cannot guarantee to answer. However, we offer a enterprise licence, where you can get support with an agreed response time and help for your projects based on Tiny Marbles. If you have questions about a professional support, please don't hesitate to ask us.

How do I get involved?

Join our forum! This is a great resource if you have a question, or just want to know how to get started. It is also the best place to find the Tiny Marbles developers and solve your doubts.

Also submit issues. Found a bug? Want a feature? Let us know! We think you will find the development team to be very responsive.

Are precompiled binaries available?

Yes, you can find them in our download sector.

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Tiny Marbles usage

What projects work best with Tiny Marbles?

Projects that require a reliable content and media management are great, as well as projects for community and collaboration tasks. Tiny Marbles is designed to match requirements of larger corporate business websites and complex internet platforms which needs a powerful content and user management system. If you only need a blog or a CMS for your private homepage, Tiny Marbles certainly will be an overkill.

The ambition of Tiny Marbles is to provide a software kernel with all basic features for the management of articles, media files, users and authorisation. You probably would like to extend the functionality, which can be done very easily using the existing Tiny Marbles architecture and patterns which are provided with the distribution.

Can I use Tiny Marbles directly out of the box?

For the admin part of your project: yes, for the view part of your website: no. After you downloaded Tiny Marbles we even provide a standalone version, which you can use after a some clicks and only little configuration. Or you deploy Tiny Marbles on an Java application server using a SQL database. But in any case you only can use the administration pages out of the box. Still you have to take care about your specific website and your project. This is not necessarily a disadvantage, because we believe that corporate business websites and complex internet plaforms cannot be build only by changing for example a style sheet.

What skills do I need to use Tiny Marbles?

Since you still need to take care about your specific project or website based on Tiny Marbles you should have Java skills. You don't need the knowledge of Enterprise Java Beans, but it is certainly helpful if you already worked with Open Source technologies like Struts, Hibernate or Spring. And of course you should be familiar with XHTML, Java Script, Prototype, script.aculo.us and CSS.

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Technical details

How do you store the data?

Tiny Marbles is persisted using Hibernate. We use a Rich Domain Model to guarantee data consistency and the smart functionality present in the basic objects.

How does Tiny Marbles manage a large number of users or content?

Especially community and collaboration platforms have the problem with growing data, like for instance users, discussion entries or images. Internally the architecture of Tiny Marbles is already prepared for that. There are some possibilities, which you could do, for instance setting up a TomCat cluster or a database cluster. Since we use Hibernate for the persistence layer, Hibernate Shards could also be a good idea. In any case, it always will be an extension of Tiny Marbles, but at the time we designed the data model and the architecture, we prepared as much as possible for a solution supporting an unlimited growth of data.

Is a search engine available?

Yes, there is, we deliver Tiny Marbles with the Open Source search engine Lucene. By default, each article and each article version is added or deleted from the search index automatically in Tiny Marbles. To make the usage of Lucene easier, we furthermore provide Luigi, which aims to provide Lucene's full-text search in a highly configurable and loosely coupled library. This could be very helpful in case you intend to add a search feature on your project or website.

What about video converter and video streaming?

Uploading a video file to a web server is simple, but providing the user the liberty to upload nearly any video file without converting it before uploading is another question. We solved that problem, that all vidoes which are being uploaded to the server land in a queue where a converter converts the video automatically on the server side. This is very convenient for the user, but also for the administrator of a website. The user doesn't need to care about which video codec or format he has to use, and the administrator can be sure, that all video files on the platform after the conversion have the same format and size for the video player on the website. To use the converter, the Open Source software FFmpeg needs to be installed on the web server.

Even video streaming is already prepared in Tiny Marbles. All you need is a camera and a streaming server. Tiny Marbles only supports the streaming server Red5, which is Open Source and available for free. Anything else can be done with the livestreaming feature of Tiny Marbles.

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