[Grouptime-developers] fundamental ideas [grouptime core]

[<lu...@uf...>]

Hi all! In peace?

I have some ideas about fundamental features of our core.
These are, as i see, the must-have features of this part of the 
project. I sorted this features by modules, they are:

::DB
  - Database independent
  - Configuration should be source independent, i mean, it should 
    be possible to load configuration vars from xml, text files,
    ldap, etc.
  - Must be all Object Oriented
  - It should be easy to port this database abstration to new database systems
    by just extending a set of basic classes (interfaces or abstract)

::Template System
  - Must be all Object Oriented
  - It should be easy to define new template structures (very extensible)
  - It should be very reliable and fast
  - it should support basic control structures like if, else, nested loops, etc

::User Management
  - Authentication
    + The login/password and group definition source must be transparent, 
      I mean, when writing scripts, it doesn't matter if the login/password 
      pairs and groups are being validated against a text file, xml, database
      or ldap server.
    + This authentication component will consist in these classes and some more:
      - User  - represents users :-P
      - Group - represents groups which contains other groups and users
    + It should be easy to extend these classes to support other kind of sources
  - Autorization
    + I should be able to map resources to user groups 
    + It should be easy to apply autorization setting to class methods
::Session Management
  - It should have all basic tasks for session:
    + Create session
    + destroy session
    + register new session vars
    + unregister new session vars

Probably you have percept that all modules hould have some kind of 
independence about the kind source from where they get configuration 
settings. I think we could develop a simple component that would be able to 
retrieve settings from diferent formats. For example, suppose that i need to 
load conf parameters to create a new database connection. I need to retrieve 
values like database name, host, username and password. This component could
load this from a xml, textfile, of ldap, using the same class interface. 
What do you think? This maybe sounds a litle bit complicated but it's not! :-)

Another feature that i think we should really rely on: all configuration files
must be in xml format. This is good for portability, interoperability with other
systems, and this is a very consisent format to describe data. I'd like to know
what do you think about this?

Please, suggest more things about these first ideas!

This is all for now.

peace!

--lucasr

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