[binarycloud-general] Practical use of r2

[Phillip S. <te...@al...>]

Greetings.

I've been lurking on this list for awhile now, and have an interest
in BC's capabilities.  I consider myself to be an intermediate PHP
developer, and am contemplating the possibility of using r2 as the
framework for a project.

Specifically, there is an existing open source project [ Ministry of
Truth - http://mot.sourceforge.net ] that is no longer being actively
maintained.  I am giving serious thought to picking up development
because I've not found any other software that fills the same niche,
and because I've spoken with the original author who has encouraged me to
do so. The problem with this is that I am not comfortable with the way its
idea/essence is currently implemented, and would really want to rebuild it
from the ground up (the TODO and feature list is long, and it seems pointless
to try re-inventing the wheel with what's there).  For those that don't
care to visit the website, MOT currently allows one to group db tables/fields
relationally into larger more useful things (e.g project tracking,
hardware/software inventory, etc.), all without having to know anything about
html/php/sql (given that it was originally written in 1998 and includes its
own built-in XML parser, it's still an impressive and usable piece of
software).

r2 would appear to be a candidate for a new MOT framework (other
possibilites might be Horde [ http://www.horde.org/ ]), but I have concerns
about how to create a distributable "product" based on it (MOT will continue
to be strictly GPL, of course).  I'm having difficulty envisoning how I
would incorporate it in such a way as to minimize the setup requirements for
my user base.  For some, getting Apache and PHP installed is enough of a
hurdle (not everyone uses .rpm or .deb based systems).  Would I say "you
need Apache, PHP (plus all it's special dependencies), and r2 .. after you
fight with that, you use MOT as a plug-in", or is there a recommended way I
could easily encapsulate r2's overhead into my configuration system?  I would
like to be able to say "Here's MOT.  Run the installer." once they have
met the Apache/PHP requirement.

Second, how viable is r2 as a development platform right now?  Obviously
it's still under heavy development, but is it becoming mature enough to
start building production-quality applications?  I expect that it will take
me a few weeks to spec out what I will include as part of the initial rewrite
of MOT (its existing functionality plus a subset of the TODO), so my question
is more focused on the "stable" parts of r2.  In other words, which
components of MOT can I concentrate on re-implementing now using the least
changing parts of r2?  The website/documentation doesn't give a clear
indication of what's complete and what's not.. guess I can always dive
in and find out though.

Looking at the mailing list archives, I see that some of my questions
are answered (lots of recommendations from Alex to use r2 over r1 at this
point).  The recent "BC quick-start guide" thread is helpful, but I don't
see anyone trying to use BC for something like this (most uses seem to be
for custom website projects rather than a self-contained, portable web
application).  Correct me if I'm wrong.

Just to be clear, I'm not in a major hurry here.  If I was, then I would go
ahead and consider r1 and worry about the conversion issues later.  I get
the feeling though that I will be able to plan my goals around r2's
development cycle, and that enough of r2 is complete now.  It would be
helpful to have some idea on the overall status and usability of specific r2
sections (documentation on all this once r2 is finished is great, but I
would still like to start developing now), and I would appreciate general
feedback from anyone who is currently using it to do productive things.

Thanks in advance.

-phillip

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