Preface

Table of Contents

Project motivation & history
Acknowledgments
Contact

Project motivation & history

Working as developer and later lead engineer on various Java and C++ projects in the recent years, I had to spend a serious amount of time reguarly checking various sources of information: build reports, source code metrics, PMD and CheckStyle reports, the source code itself, project pages of the dependencies, industry news in online mags and such. In other words, I had to filter and manage information coming from different places to get a global picture about the current state of the project. This process was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming, and distracted me from the more enjoyable part of engineering.

Other members of the team suffered from the same problem, however they wanted to have this global 24/7 picture from a slightly different aspect, based on their "roles" in the team. We clearly needed some flexible and easily personalizable solution.

And this is what portals are about, right? Aggregation and customization.

Later I came up with the idea of developing a suite of lightweight, highly customizable portlets backed by a central server mechanism, and then deploying those to a customization-enabled portlet container. This way beside having a "reference" community page, everyone could set-up his own personal portal page.

This was how Kosmos has born.

While working on the very first portlets, I contacted JBoss and had explained them my plans. They liked the idea, it was in sync with certain things what they wanted to do themselves, so they invited my project as one of the first projects hosted in their new-born JBoss Labs forge.

Figure 1. Kosmos logo

Kosmos logo

In the very beginning, the project ran under a different temporary codename, but when incubating it to JBoss Labs, I had to find out the final name. As the guys at JBoss were waiting for me, I had to come up with a fancy name in a couple of hours. I decided to use the word kosmos, because of several reasons:

  • is there anything more beautyful than our universe?
  • the cosmos flower is a real beauty with its simplicity
  • "mikrokozmosz" is a wonderful musical piece by Bela Bartok, one of the greatest Hungarian composers
  • gives the opportunity to play more with the notions related, like "kosmonaut"
  • a name with the length of six characters perfectly fits Java package names, jar filenames and such