Re: Some questions on Ex-Nunc architecture

[Alessandro S. <a.s...@ta...>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 08:29:46PM +0200, David MENTRE wrote:
> You should take a look at Ocsigen, they have a fairly complete mechanism
> to handle POST and GET parameters.

We will. It's a very interesting project. It uses a fully functional
approach, and it could be a valuable source of inspiration.
Additionally, since I lack a solid functional programming background, it
could give me some real examples of functional idioms. In fact, I have
an object oriented background, and Ex-nunc is the first non-toy project
I develop using a functional language. Therefore, I really appreciate
the multiparadigmatic nature of OCaml, because it somewhat eases the
transition.

> From your description, Ex-Nunc seems very close to WDialog, except at

It is. We chose WDialog and ASP.NET as sources of inspiration, because
both are modern Web frameworks that offer the developer a higher level
of abstraction, and because I know ASP.NET quite well and I use it at
work.

> the syntax level, with Ex-Nunc's <?xnc> tags, which seem easier to
> use.

We would like to let the developer use his favorite programming style.
If he feels more comfortable with a PHP-style syntax, then he can stick
with that style. But if he needs more abstraction, he should get it. We
like the Perl's motto: TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It.)

> Have you considered merging the two code bases (or re-use Gerd's
> code)?

Unfortunately, there are licensing issues. WDialog (and Ocsigen too) is
released under GPL license. If we merged that code, we'd have to change
our license to GPL. But we chose the MIT/X11 license, because it is more
permissive.

> From my post on caml-list, I see that a lot of people have implemented
> parts of framework (Ex-Nunc and WDialog have the same session
> management, Ocsigen handles GET and FORM parameters, none of them handle
> i18n, etc.). In such a case, I'm always wondering how would it be
> possible to combine those parts, considering that a given framework
> rarely suits one's needs.

I think that these are some of the pros and cons of the open source
model. There are many pieces of software that do the same thing in a
slightly different manner. But you have the chance to look at the
internals and to pick the "best" implementation here and there.
Obviously, in the real world, it isn't that simple. Moreover, I don't
think that the number of usable OCaml Web frameworks is high enough to
make the above process effective. But, probably, the situation will
change in the (near) future.

> In fact, I don't know what the perfect framework would be. I've never
> used web languages like PHP and certainly not other frameworks in Java
> or Python. But I do know that the ideal framework should use and be
> programmed in OCaml! ;-)

I definitely agree. :-)

Regards,
Alessandro