[Modus-devs] sorting, caching, a welcome message, etc.

[Nathan D. <na...@ch...>]

(welcome to Raymond Camden to modus-devs!)

I just checked in a first pass as sorting, with a getAllSorted() method on
both the basePersister and an interface to it on the baseContentObject.  I'm
not totally happy with the implementation, but it does work.  I updated the
modustest app to sort on the "featured" field descending, then on title, and
it works like a charm.

I also put some basic caching into the basePersister, but due to the bugs
with persistent memory scopes (or perhaps due to some idiocy of my own) it
isn't working, so it's forced to never look in the cache right now (the
isObjectCached() method always returns false), but once SP1 comes out
(assuming it fixes that issue) we can try it out.  The current caching does
a "one a time" method of caching objects, and each persister implementation
can decide how best to use the machinery of the basePersister, which
provides:

isObjectCached(id)
cachePutObject(object)
cacheGetObject(id)

I implemented this in the simpleObjectInstance persister, and it seems like
it will do what it's supposed to do, but I couldn't get it to populate field
values properly.  Not sure if it's a memory-scope issue or not, though.  (I
think for 0.2 I'll build a persistence implementation that uses the file
system instead of a database, so Modus can be used "out of the box" more
easily.)

I also built:

isCacheInitialized()
cacheInit()

which are used when the persister is initialized, so a user should never
have to think about them.

I am still eager to think about the option of using a large XML DOM and
xPath to do some truly powerful stuff.  The XML would be something like:

<contentObjects>
	<contentObject id="" type="" dateCreated="" dateModified="">
		<field name="" value="">
		<field name="" value="">
	</contentObject>
	<contentObject id="" type="" dateCreated="" dateModified="">
		<field name="" value="">
		<field name="" value="">
	</contentObject>
</contentObjects>



 - n