Cascade Server -- Serves all your needs to its best !!
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Cascade Server is being used by the whole organization to develop and maintain the main university website and the individual department websites. The Communication Department of the university takes charge of maintaining Cascade Server for our university, and there are a whole bunch of employees including developers, managers, administrators etc. who have done a tremendous job in developing and maintaining the web and mobile version of the college website.
I work for the Architecture Department of our university, and my job is to create templates as per the department requirements, and I feel proud of being a part of this.
I work for the Architecture Department of our university, and my job is to create templates as per the department requirements, and I feel proud of being a part of this.
Pros
- What I personally like about Cascade Server is the fact that it does its best as a Content Management Website by providing minimum work of just entering text and uploading files to the department people who have to maintain the website but have no programming and development background.
- The Asset factories, Metadatas etc. makes it much more easier for the people who maintain their websites using Cascade. It makes every feature available in just one click.
- The above points were from the maintenance point of view. Now, as I developer, I would say, I enjoyed working on Cascade as it provides an easy way to write and execute your code. Also it provides the upload feature, where in you can simply upload the existing code file onto Cascade and use it as is or edit it if required.
- Also, I like that Cascade Server automatically generates code for some complex features such as index blocks.
Cons
- Personally, as a developer I feel it would be better to have a facility to see the page source directly from Cascade, rather than publishing the entire page and then looking the page source code, as sometimes looking at page source becomes important while debugging.
- Also, Cascade provides detailed documentation on how to implement different features provided by Cascade, however, I felt a little more documentation should be provided about what each features does, what is it exactly for. This would help the naive developers to understand the workflow easily. It took me sometime to understand what are content types for, why do we need configuration set, data definitions, format files etc.
- Apart from these, I find everything else perfect and easy to use, both as a developer and a website maintenance person.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well, I would say Cascade Server is well suited for universities and organizations, where you will find different departments, some of which do not have an engineering, programming and development background. For such departments, creating, developing and maintaining a website from the scratch would require hiring people from a relevant background. Instead, using a content management website such as Cascade Server would make it easy for them to maintain their department website efficiently even without having coding and programming knowledge.
Vetted Review
1 year of experience