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Tiny Marbles MUM Tutorial
The story
We want to teach you how to develop a web application without starting from scratch.
For this tutorial, we imagined a Java developer (we call him Joey) who wants to quickly put together a web application and is not sure if Tiny Marbles has the right idea. We tag along as he downloads MUM's source code and enhances MUM to suit his needs.
In the process, you will learn our development philosophy for web applications. The fundamental concepts behind Tiny Marbles and Talos are also explained here. You will also acquire enough knowledge to build your own Marbles-based web applications if you want to.
What to expect
Since Tiny Marbles is about data modelling, most of the tutorial will describe Joey's solutions to common web development problems and data modelling. We divided the tutorial in four main chapters:
Chapter 1: Download, installation and quick tour
Chapter 2: Adding new attributes to the data model
Chapter 3: Adding new object types to the data model
Chapter 4: Authorization
The first chapter is the most boring one, because you're actually dealing with build and deployment. But it's also where you'll see a Java-based webapp making its self-install. Then we describe MUM in its current state — which is a very (very!) basic user management system. Usernames, passwords, group membership, not much more.
Then Joey starts coding. Chapter two shows how things work under the hood and explains our idea for schema evolution and data model extension. You'll learn of some current limitations of MUM/Webwork/Java too. Chapter three shows you how to write new models, new controllers, new views, and how to access the existing model in productive ways.
In chapter four, Joey modifies MUM to access features from the module he developed in chapter three. We finally talk about authentication with Talos and I'm sure you'll be impressed.
If at the end you're not convinced to try out Tiny Marbles, you'll at least know where we stand in respect to web application development in general and that's good for us too.
Please send us comments, questions, criticism:
Please send us comments, questions, criticism!
