Re: [Openinteract-dev] What is OpenInteract2 ?

[Teemu A. <te...@di...>]

>> Well what I was thinking was more in the lines of OI2 not being even partly a CMS.
>
> I'm sure you can mold OI2 into whatever you want it to be... :-)

I believe that for a project to become _the_ option for a certain
target audience, it should state it's mission and roadmap pretty clearly. This builds up
confidence in the platform and provides an answer to the most important question: ok if we start
to use it now, how is it going to improve and in which direction?

Answering, that it can be anything you want it to be is pretty confusing.

Let's revisit openinteract.org first paragraph. Let's call it the mission statement:

"OpenInteract is a web application server written in Perl. It features integrated data
persistence, security, user and group management, plus an easy way to create and distribute fully
database-independent applications."

I might also emphasize that it cuts the development time for implementing most of the things you
need when writing web applications. Less code, more consistency, extensibility, modularity and
easier tracking of code revisions.

So if it's intended as a base for web application development, then why on earth does it require
you to install an CMS you might have no use for? (never mind a news, comments and a whats new
package). If you want to get rid of these, skipping the installation of the SYSTEM package bundle
excludes not only the CMS function (page) but also all the necessary modules that are required for
OI2 to function.

I understand the importance of functional examples like an CMS. Developers should have something
to play with to come up with ideas how to use the platform and how to improve it.

As such, I believe these should be optional packages, serving as one of the examples how OI2 can
be used.

As OI2 consumes so much memory and dependencies already, I believe there is no reason to "pollute"
the base installation with higher level functionality you might never need when developing a web
application, say an address book. It's simply just useless if you are not writing a CMS but
something totally different.

This is certainly a limit in the application framework if it's considered to be an application
framework. It forces you to run code in the application stack you might never need.

In my opinion, for the system to function mainly as a web application framework, it should invest
development time mainly on that statement. In my ideal scenario, when you install the OI2 base, it
would greet you with a welcome message, the documentation package and clear instructions on how to
install example functionality like the CMS, news and comments packages to play with.

All the other functionality, like security, user/group management, UI widgets etc. are very
important for web application development. Higher or more specific implementations should be
optional.

Although the lower level functionality is important, sometimes these also do not serve the
purposes. We replaced/extended most of the user/group/security stuff in our OI2 application called
Dicole (demo at http://dicole.net) because doing so served our purposes. For example, in
securities we needed more detailed access rights other than action/task level security and SPOPS
object security so we replaced the security framework and disabled the OI2 implementation. We
could have extended it if given more thought, but afterall, I'm all thumbs up for such low level
built-in functionality in the base packages.

> They're there so you can get a notion of what's possible to do OI2, and when you've seen _that_,
the _real_ big questions show up: How can I use OI2? How can I improve OI2? What should be
improved? How easy is it to improve OI2? How can I make it easier to improve OI2? What should be
improved so OI2 becomes easier to improve?

These questions can be answered if the base installation greets you as a web application framework
and not as a generic CMS.

Despite some things I'm not happy with, OI2 is still the best decision we have made when we looked
for a new base to build upon. We have done more during this time for our customers than we could
have done without. The design of the web application framework is brilliant and I'm happy to help
it to be even better.

Regards,

Teemu Arina
Dicole