[Apb-development] Re: Fw: some new apb features...

[Nathanial H. <eq...@ya...>]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darron Froese" <da...@fr...>
> To: <st...@lb...>
> Cc: <ti...@ja...>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 10:03 PM
> Subject: some new apb features...

Darron and Tim,

Brandon forwarded your comments about APB to me.  A quick introduction, my name is Nathan, and
I've been working on the APB project for a while...

> > Hey,
> >
> > Love apb - I've been using it for a week or so now and love it. Have been
> > thinking about doing something like this for months but just haven't got
> > around to it - so I figured we'd hitch a ride - me and another guy at work
> > (he coded it) added a couple of new features to apb:
> >
> > 1. A cookie based "popout external links" button so that all links that go
> > through /bookmarks/redirect.php can pop out into a new page if you desire.

Having bookmarks open in a new window is a feature that several people have asked for.  I don't
think Brandon and have discussed it much though.

> > 2. Page caching - so that a local copy of page on the other side of the
> > bookmark can be sucked down and put into the database for safe-keeping.
> > (It's still a little buggy right now but we've got the basics down pat.)

Wow, you don't know how happy I am to see this.  I've bee wanting to get around to this feature
forever.  I'm pretty happy with your implementation.  Mainly I've only ever been concerned with
getting the text of a single page with this feature (for archiving faqs, technical info, etc), so
making sure images and links work isn't a _big_ concern, but obviously most people are going to
want those things to work as well.  The feature has the potential to open a large can of worms... 
Do we get/store images?  Do we cache on a regular schedule?  Do we maintain a cached page version
history?  Do we do any recursive digging?

But mainly, what you've done so far, I'd be happy with as a user.  I think a table at the top of
the cached page (a la Google's cache) clearly stating that it's cached, the cache date, and
explaining that the links may not work is needed.

> > We have some other ideas as well (move to using Pear DB for database
> > abstraction, complete the multiuser portions, export to browser bookmarks,
> > etc.) - but those will come later - we just got slammed with a huge
> project
> > that will take up a huge portion of the next month.

I don't know what Pear DB is.  I need to look into that I guess.  We're kind of MySQL-centric.

Multiuser support isn't too far off.  It is something we will be working on heavily in the next
month.

I'm going to be working on browser bookmark -> apb importing, but apb export may be trivial once I
do that.  If you want to work on it though, it would be helpful, we should just coordinate it.

> > Are you guys interested in adopting these changes (1 is ready now and is
> > very simple, 2 needs to be tweaked a little and some UI issues need to be
> > worked out) into the main apb distribution?

I want to see the caching.  Mainly I'd like to see the UI for the authenticated apb user; how they
cache a page, etc.

I think I can safely say that we're interested in adopting both changes, but there are two issues.
 The first is mainly UI, and Brandon's in charge of that.  The second is how to integrate your
changes into our dev tree.  I don't have a lot of experience at collaborative-internet-GPL
programming.  Maybe we need to start thinking about CVS/arc/subversion.  For now we can just
brute-force it with diff.  If you have any thoughts about that, let me know.

So, the short of it is, we're very open to source contributors, we just may not be good at it yet.
 What you've done so far is very promising and exciting to see.

Nathanial Hendler
Tucson AZ, USA
http://retards.org/

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE Valentine eCards with Yahoo! Greetings!
http://greetings.yahoo.com