Can software be beautiful. For that matter - What is beauty itself. A reasearcher in the US(thats incidentally where they research all kinds of these things) try to define beauty. And he came up with the suggestion that beauty is in fact only a manifestation of the underlying functionality. Something is appreciated for its usefulness, but over time the reason behind is lost and only an abstract idea of beauty remains - and idea that connects a particular physical trait with something positive without attempting to understand the feeling.
His argument for instance, as regards the female form, is that the universally accepted statistics are in fact nothing more than numbers that indicated a woman’s ability to contribute to something that was critical to the human race as it existed then - survival and propogation of its own kind.
The first statistic indicated an woman’s ability to feed and take care of her young ones, the third was a measure of the ease with which she could deliver her child and the second - well it indicated an easy access during the process of conception:)
So, can software be beautiful. In these terms of definitions - definitely so.
MMbase is a content management software. It was initially built by a Dutch media firm for the management of their website. Their first shot at building something that would cover all their needs failed to perform at higher load levels. This prompted them to look at creating a solution that was truly comprehensive and enterprise class. The added effort, they felt, could come from the open source developer community and the code was thus released.
So what makes Mmbase beautiful?
Beauty in vision: The need for a solution that would address media companies was something that could have been solved by a product that was more focussed on its job. It would have a been a bit inflexble but could have been built very quickly. However Mmbase goes beyond addresssing the needs of a particular industry. It tries to be a software that addresses almost everything under the sky - and succeeds. Which is what makes all the difference between vision and a pipe dream.
Beauty in conception: MMbase is conceived of to be object oriented. Of course there are million others who claim the same. But MMbase genuinely subscribes to this concept and takes it to the absolute nth level. Even the very components that make the application are treated as objects. And starting from that zero it allows you to build a complex web of applications that involve these objects and the way they relate to one another. Imagine the whole world being built with just three entities calles electrons, protons and neutrons and you would know what I mean.
Beauty in execution: Naturally something that is designed to be simple in its design needs to have a comlex machinery running it. Culling information from a data structure that is so object oriented would bring any application to a grinding halt. And this is where Mmbase works its magic. Using a complex mix of multiple database connnections, caching of queries and indexing it delivers a performance that allows pages to load almost instantaneously, however comlex the actual query may be.
Beauty in scope: MMbase is by far the most comprehensive software - both in features and administration - that I have used. Built around its core Content management engine are a customised lucene search application, and adminstration area with its own database management tool, XML editors, mailing application, image handler, a beautiful graphical visualisation tool that allows one to actually view the created structures, XML APIs, JSP tag libraries, wizards to create editors and a whole suite of applications covering almost everything one could ask for. There was a time when I used to wish if a certain something was available on it - I no longer do that - I just look for it since I am quite sure it would have already been built.
Beauty in Idealism - As an open source project with no leanings MMbase goes the extra mile to ensure that its users are truly "free". Built on Java, MMbase allows choice in the operating system, database, application server - the three main components that help run it.
Truly Beautiful.