Re: [Webware-devel] Re-design of webware site...

[Edmund L. <el...@in...>]

On 03/30/2003 01:53:10 AM Ian wrote:

>There's a perception -- unfortunately not entirely unfounded -- that
Webware isn't
>going anywhere.  I think we've been making some more progress lately,
>and a new website could help people better realize that.  I like the
>design.

Website design aside, that issue of Webware not going anywhere is a thorny
one. It is a great, easy to use platform, but we are all reinventing the
wheel in that there is no easy way for us to build reuseable, modular
applications in the same sense that Zope has (maybe this is a bad example).

What I mean is that the very flexible, open nature of Webware that
attracted each of us to it also means that each of us uses different bits
and pieces to suit our (legitimate) project needs. But building
Humpty-Dumpty requires more than finding pieces and trying to fit them
together. It actually requires a higher level understanding of what the
whole looks like and how current and future pieces can and should fit
together. It is this higher level framework that seems to be missing.

I, for example, am using Webware, FunFormKit, Cheetah, and PostgreSQL
because flexibility and data integrity matters to me. Somebody else might
use Webware, PSP, MiddleKit, and MySQL, because ease of development and
deployment matters to him. When this happens, we can't use each other's
model or controller logic (I'm using the MVC paradigm as a basis of
discussion here) because we don't even have a consistent way to reuse basic
stuff like user authentication, security, etc. And we can't reuse the view
level logic because we don't use the same presentation level techniques.

It seems to me that for Webware to go anywhere in terms of developing a
rich selection of ready-to-run packages and universally useful things like
authentication and security, we need to agree to some standard
application-level framework, API, database, etc.

...Edmund.