[Phpwebsite-developers] phpWS on a local ASP, plus UML

[Todd O. <to...@da...>]

I am helping an ISP offer phpWS as a product and act as an Application
Service Provider.  More on that later.  Unfortunately, my work schedule
picked up about 400% right when my best thoughts on phpWS/2 were emerging.
I still think phpWS/2 should proceed.  Binarycloud is progressing well, but
it's not trying to reach the same goals as phpWS/2.

If you aren't using DIA, then you should get it
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/  It's a GTK diagramming package like
Visio and offers a great UML extension (uniform modeling language).  It also
runs on Windows.

The best content management system around is the Ars Digita Community System
(ACS) www.arsdigita.com.  Conservative estimates have the open source
project development at $2 million, maybe $5 million.  The project's biggest
problem is that it's written in TCL, uses AOLserver and Oracle only, with
much of the code written in Oracle's database language, PL.  ACS 4.2 has
_solved_ all the permission, group and granularity problems that we
discussed in April.  Their object models (in SQL at least) are far beyond
anything I've seen in other projects.  Of course many MIT CS grad students
working on a project funded by _big_ corporations helps a lot.  Ars Digita's
minimum web design project used to be $1 million, with a portion continually
going to improve the core.

Anyway, I am using the DIA UML package (which is open source and uses XML
files) to diagram the phpWS/2 core, which I hope everyone will like (the
visual presentation really helps you understand what's going on).  This core
will be heavily modeled after ACS 4.x.  Once the data model is "approved" by
the other core developers, then we will start coding.  If there is interest,
I could post it as I'm working.

If you are really interested in this, please download a copy of ACS 4.2 and
read the code and HTML documentation thoroughly before you look at the UML
diagrams.  ACS's staff did a great job on the docs.

My wife and I are leaving the kids with my sister-in-law and taking a tenth
anniversary cruise beginning Saturday, so I will be net-free for at least a
week; my longest time ever.  I can't wait to read several hundred emails
when I return ;)

Enjoy your July 4th holiday and I look forward to more activity in the weeks
ahead.

--Todd