Dorn Consulting

Christoph is on a mission to make a difference in how we develop web-based applications. His main pet peeve is how much time developers waste on finding, evaluating, learning about, installing, configuring, integrating, testing and debugging the same open source software. Furthermore most developers are not specifically trained in these disciplines leading to uninformed decisions and orphaned efforts. Before we can gain real progress in the typical software development lifecycle we need to have a toolchain we can manipulate programatically and an IT sector soly focused on providing products and services to abstract the software we write and the processes we use. Christoph is not talking about increasing bloat and complexity, but establishing an approach that focuses on achieving optimal lifecycles by supplanting component coupling, dependency, configuration and provisioning concerns from the manual to the meta level. Christoph believes all the technological building blocks required to make this happen already exist but progress is hampered by a disjointed body of code. This is especially true for open source software where there is no all-encompassing platform like we are used to from commercial vendors. Christoph's approach to move in the right direction revolves around developing a suite of tools on top of a carefully crafted and liberally licensed stack that adheres to open standards and uses open infrastructure to compartmentalize, describe and make queryable every aspect, task and process involved in producing software. Christoph searched far and wide for exceptional components to base his tools on and in selecting an initial stack of technologies that have the features and potential to prove themselves as an amazingly efficient platform for client/server browser based application development and deployment. The projects below are Christoph's initial set of building blocks for a new breed of toolchain.