Matt Asay of Alfresco announced in his CNet blog that the Thalia application framework built as an open source software by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Information Services & Technology won an InfoWorld award. Here's a description of Thalia from the InfoWorld website:

MIT's Information Services and Technology group developed Thalia, an application framework for the management of image and other digital media. To ensure the product's success, MIT partnered with Questcon Technologies, a QA and test specialty firm, to validate the application before releasing to MIT's departments. Thalia comprises a rich Web client and the Image Management Engine, which provides a framework of distinct, reusable components via its REST-style APIs. Thalia's Web client was built using OpenLaszlo and is compiled to create a Flash interface. Thalia's back end comprises Java servlets exposed as REST Web services, and it interfaces with the Alfresco open source ECM (enterprise content management) system. The framework allows MIT departments to upload, organize, tag, present, discuss, and search multimedia content.

OpenLaszlo can perfectly be used to improve the presentation layer of web applications, connecting to many of the existing open source CMS, webapplication development frameworks and digital content repositories. As long as the back-end system provides web services to connect to the integration of an OpenLaszlo rich Internet application client with the back-end doesn't pose any problems, providing a superb user experience across runtimes like DHTML/Ajax and Flash.

Congratulations to the whole Thalia team! It's always inspiring to see what you are building with our technology.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Community, General, Sightings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.