As head of engineering at TravelMuse, I have been rather quiet until now, being quite busy with the June launch of our Beta site. As we gear up for our next release (code name: "Kuala Lumpur"), I thought I should take this opportunity to give you some insights into the technology we're using to provide you with new travel content on a regular basis as well as handy trip planning tools.

At TravelMuse, we're here for the long haul to serve your needs, and we invested in a modern Enterprise Java platform based on open standards, which allows us to assemble best of breed technologies to deliver great next-generation Web applications. The 21st century brought us the open source revolution, and it happens that nowadays “best of breed” often means community-based software. That's why many of our site’s key technologies are open source projects from the community such as GlassFish Application Server (more details in a Sun stories blog), MySQL Database Server and Alfresco Web CMS (Content Management System).

The latter is worth mentioning as it is a key enabler for our small team to be able to reliably publish destination information and a dozen new articles to the site on a weekly basis. Once the structure of each type of document is defined in the CMS and rendering templates are developed by the engineering team, our editorial team can then independently produce content into the CMS through Web forms, preview it for quality assurance and then deploy to production with minimal engineering involvement (freeing up our time to build new nifty features for you!).

Over the next few months, you will see tremendous investments made in our trip planning functionality to address all aspects of the process and improve its usability. I'm very excited about bringing all those state of the art planning tools online and we look forward to your feedback on how you use TravelMuse and what your favorite features are!