For the moment, I'm the only developer. My name is Alexis Grandemange. You can send me a mail at alexis.grandemange@pagebox.net

I used to be the main designer and lead developer of an Intranet solution.

At this time I was working for BEA and the customer was a large French bank. It had 2000 agencies and 23000 personal computers. The main constraint was the bandwidth. The solution had to work with frame relay between 32 and 256 Kbps - and 256 Kbps only for largest agencies. We needed a solution easy to deploy and administrate. So we deployed a presentation server - IIS with ASP pages in every agency that called central applications.

I program in Java since 1996 but I started to work seriously on Application Servers only in fall 1999. During summer 2000, I submitted an article project about class loaders to Java Developer Journal. It accepted the layout. I came back to the design above to illustrate the article and the concept turned to be more exciting than I expected. The article is now divided in three parts, the first one illustrating presentation hosting, a second one administration and a third one the security.

I found the concept required more work. I defined an architecture and I extended what was initially the article reference implementation to something comprehensive and usable. I have still parts to write and document but I think I have exhausted trickiest cases and potential showstoppers. It works.

Check News, FAQ and Mapper to get the idea. I think the most important concept is publish and subscribe. It enables the creation of constellations. It is even fashionable as it uses a P2P protocol:-)

1. Everyone can create a constellation. A constellation is both a set of PageBoxes and repositories and a security authority that allows creating PageBoxes and repositories
2. Everyone can create a Presentation host (aka a PageBox) and add it to a constellation with subscribe
3. Everyone can add a Presentation repository (see Publisher)
4. Everyone can add a Presentation to a repository with publish

It should allow the creation of commercial or free public constellations and of private constellations. The benefits are:

1. Presentation runs closer to the user so the response time is better
2. It allows to make content adaptation

My most recent work was about Cocoon/SOAP integration. The net result is that you no longer need to know Java to write a PageBox presentation.

At the moment, I'm focused on PageBox. I took however the time to write my Picture exhibition and to create a PageBox logo, . It shows dynamic presentations (pages) flying gracefully on a PageBoxed Internet (blue sphere). In the past I used to make photographs and to play as an actor (Stanislavsky method).