Market demands are changing at an ever increasing pace. How agile your organization is can directly affect your competitiveness—and the bottom line. While CommonSpot is a commercial solution, it meets these demands with a powerful yet easy-to-use open-source Application Development Framework (ADF) to develop new applications, leverage open source applications developed by the PaperThin community, and extend the website capabilities. Developers can work smarter, be more productive and better support their organizations strategic initiatives. 

 The ADF consists of:

  • A core Model-View-Controller framework, object factory, app structure and development methodology for improving development and deployment of applications 
  • Global extensions such as custom field types, custom scripts and display and rendering components
  • Common components and functions, including access to CommonSpot's rich set of API’s
  • Third-party components for using best-of-breed utilities, such as jQuery 

The ADF allows developers to build portable applications and deploy code customizations more effectively to implement or integrate functionality. All the components needed to build an application, manage and display the data – including initial configuration of the data structure – are provided out-of-the-box. All the repetitive tasks are taken care of for you such as creating working directories and database tables, and forms interfaces are accessible via the user interface instead of waiting for database administrators. 

Developers can leverage custom code to fulfill any presentation, functionality, or data integration requirement. Best-of-breed utilities such as jQuery can be seamlessly integrated into the framework without having to configure each app separately. CommonSpot, with its application development framework, offers the value of open source combined with all of the advantages of a tested CMS solution, truly the best of both worlds.

  • Incrementally Grow the CMS
    CommonSpot provides a flexible and scalable Web foundation upon which to grow your organization's website. In addition, the ADF allows you to incrementally grow your CMS, extending its life and ensuring that CommonSpot is the last CMS solution you will ever need to buy. 
     
  • Accelerate Time to Market
    Jumpstart application development initiatives by shaving time off of projects that would otherwise take weeks to code. Developers can complete projects in the ADF in mere days saving organizations time and money, and helping achieve faster time to market. The time saved helps developers focus more time improving the end-user experience for the apps they create, as well as move on to more strategic initiatives. 
     
  • Leverage Community-Driven Open Source Apps On Demand
    How well your organization keeps pace with change can directly affect your competitiveness—and the bottom line. CommonSpot provides robust features out-of-the-box, combined with the ability to create new or leverage open source applications created by the PaperThin Community—on demand. This makes developers heroes with Marketing—and the CIO. 
     
  • Create More Powerful Applications
    Unlike typical out-of-the-box applications (such as blogs, wikis, etc). CommonSpot enables developers to augment applications through the use of mashups. Developers can easily combine many applications (such as profile + calendar + comments + voting + forms) to create more powerful applications that suit their exact needs and provide end users with the richest experience possible. 
     
  • Increase interoperability
    Easily pull information from legacy applications such as ERP systems, HR systems, etc. making CommonSpot highly interoperable. 
     
  • Leverage a community of experts
    Run by customers for customers, the PaperThin Community website—a.k.a. 'The Commons'—gives developers many distinct advantages that help you work smarter, be more productive, and better support your organization's strategic business initiatives. Among other things, you can network with your peers and leverage the open source apps, knowledge, and expertise of the PaperThin community. Community features include: user profiles, forums, blogs, articles, apps, topic webinars, ask the expert sessions, and so on.

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