This weekend I played around with the first version of hybris, which was released back in 2001. At that time, hybris was titled “hybris e-business platform”.
I unpacked the archive and installed the system. The archive is about 66 MB in size. The built-in application server was Oracle9iAS. The first version was based on Struts, EJB, and Java 1.3.
There were no cockpits, only one HMC, called WebMC. Here is what the main admin page looked like:
“Ant clean all” took 49 seconds. hybris was ready to work 15 seconds after I launched the server.
The next step was initialization. A predecessor of HAC init looked like this:
The initialization process took about 6 seconds.
The sample storefront was very ascetic and unpretentious. (Nice TVs 🙂)
The next screenshot shows the first version of HMC, called WebMC in hybris 1.0. It seems that its UI did not change much over the years.
It had a similar look to the version available at the time, but that version didn’t use the ZKoss Framework. hybris rewrote the HMC code later.
The internal name of the product was Jakarta. So all classes have jakarta as part of the packages. By the way, Jalo layer stands for Jakarta Logic.
There is a predecessor of HAC:
It is interesting that the first version of hybris didn’t use any search engines. Product search was implemented as a simple FlexibleSearch request with LIKE.
The default storefront template code processed credit card details without any encryption. It was possibly supposed to be part of the partner’s responsibilities.
There are many concepts that come from the initial version without significant changes. For example, files such as project.properties, build.xml, extensioninfo.xml, localization properties, and items.xml are very similar to the ones we have in the latest version. It is clear that each version added a lot to the initial concept, but they are quite recognizable.
However, in 2001 hybris supported cluster mode, UDP invalidations, multilanguage support, and the type system.
It was a pleasure to have a look at the first release. In 2001 I was working on my own web programming language, called ArtPublishing. It was written in C++; it was a one-pass parser and interpreter. A bit later, my team released a Content Management System called ContentRight, written completely in ArtPublishing. Sixteen years ago, we were reinventing the wheel, but the result paid off because, at that time, innovation meant more than supportability and reliability. It was very interesting to compare similar products. The latest version of hybris has a lot from its initial version. Evolution works.
© Rauf Aliev, November 2016