Another thing I'd like to mention in terms of rapid development. We use Code generation to jump start most development. I highly recommend Codesmith Tools. In our svn you can find a .zip containing the older 2.6 freeware version which doesn't time out. There are a number of templates for mojoPortal development that I have written and continue to evolve located in the CodeSmithTemplates folder in svn. Most of them work even with the older freeware version but a few don't so I've put adapted alternatives in a sub folder. I use the newest version myself and highly recommend it.

I mention this because I have templates that can:

1. Stub out pages, modulecontrols, some ui databinding code for grids

2. Point it at a MS SQL db table and it can generate data access code for any of our supported dbs.

3. generate table scripts for the other dbs by using MS SQL

4. generate stored procedures for MS SQL and PostgreSQL for basic CRUD as well as optimized page selection of data.

5. generate a starter business class from a table that can consume the code generated by the data access template above

The new version of Codesmith also has a driver for MySQL so you can generate from MySQL or MS SQL. You can also author your own templates starting from mine or there are tons of templates included with it and also available online from others.

It really helps me be productive to use these scripts but I review all the code carefully after generation and most features require some cusomization.

Hope it helps,

Joe