[binarycloud-dev] Er, what is the Entity Manager going to do?

[Justin F. <je...@ey...>]

Alex:

First of all, please do not consider this something like
pressure.  But, this question(s) which I will pose may
be relevant to others on this list that are also in a
module writing frenzy.  Experience that we have had
and question that have arisen may be useful to expose.

It seems to me, firstly, that one of the "arts" that
will be acquired to exploint the huge potential of BC
is the knack for isolating the functionality of a module
to the just-right-level, nothing really different that
the difficulty in OOP of designing a class effectively.

Now we are writing/testing/learning BC by writing modules
for an Intranet.  There will be dozens or hundreds of
different reports, and so we break down these reports
to kind of three things:

	0.  A data fetcher	// unique, db's etc
	------------------
	1.  A selector		// general
	2.  A lister		// general
	3.  A pager		// general

with which one can bolt together any report on any
set of data quickly, as well as serve as pieces for
a dynamic report generator.  The goal is that these
are so generally written that these will be the
only three modules needed for any and all reports.

Immediately, and I mean immediately, inter-module
communication is necessary, as the Selector has to
pass in a data structure of data to the Lister,
and the Selector also has to make some kind of
method call with a data structure argument that
sets up the list in certain kinds of formats/look/
feel.  Then the Pager has to control how many
rows to display, and a kind of control data structure
has to be passed around.

Whew, all of this "works".  But these damn data structures
are "hand crafted" at this moment and easily "forgotten"
and so there are a lot of nuisance errors.

Jason and I keep thinking, "Waaall, this Entity Manager
is going to solve our problem."

It is not clear, understandably, just what the Entity
Manager is going to do.  The words in the documentation
make sense, but specifically,

1.  Will we be able to define a data structure with it
	like, externally in XML, and then refer to this
	as what we want to pass around in certain places?
2.  Or, will data structures have to be defined in each
	program "by hand"?
3.  Are "easy" declarations even going to be a part of
	the Entity Manager.
4.  Many other questions...

I just don't know what this animal is going to offer.
For certain, what I feel a need for is a facility that
"fixes" somehow, certain data structures, makes them
easy to declare, and fill, and allow us to have a "standard"
set of them, so I can tell, say, Jason, to write this
or that module and make sure you use the FOOBAT
data structure as the formal argument to

$NewModule->some_setup_method($FOOBAT_TYPE);

Lordy, I hope this is what will be possible.  If not,
then I might be forced in to add this kind of
convenience.  At the present state of things, one
gets tired easily at this level of complexity.
 
_jef

PS:  And when is a first cut of Entity Manager likely????
PPS:  If we want anything "next", it is Entity Manager.
-- 
Justin Farnsworth
Eye Integrated Communications
321 South Evans - Suite 203
Greenville, NC 27858 | Tel: (252) 353-0722