Re: [Webmacro-devel] What my webapp will offer web designers

[<web...@st...>]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Lane Sharman wrote:

| Hi Marc,
|
| This sounds good..

I second that..!

|
| I think my point that I have been trying to raise stems from the issue
| of the lure of having a really easy web app kit and then thinking you
| can do some things like consistent transactions with it out of the box.
| See google "Transaction ACID" for a general discussion on transaction
| consistency and how easy is to get it wrong in a multi-threaded env like
| a single servlet.
|
| What I am trying to help you do is to develop a framework which will
| allow and not preclude an ACID transaction.

However, there are tons of websites that only show .. you know .. text and
pictures. Companies that only "wants a precense on the Internet".

If this thing was mixed with a content management system (which enforced
some kind of transaction acidity on the content/articles it creates and
manages), then you'd have something that would allow most "websites" to be
developed fast and good.

The following is a side-note to people that constantly whine that "it's
impossible to make a CMS":
  It IS possible to make a CMS! We (CoreTrek) actually have one!  ;)
It's in PHP. The idea is that articles are made up of "elements", e.g.
picture, textfield, single text-line, movie, "wysiwyg" text-element. Well,
sounds somewhat static, right?
  But how our developers have come about using this (I'm not on that
group, btw) is that they use the content of such elements as triggers on
the site.  So they develop the site, then tell the customer: if you put a
"1" in this field here (a single-line), then the background becomes green,
and if you put a "1" here, then the image is rotated 90 degrees, this date
here tells the system which day the bell shall ring, etc. In addition, a
article have a tag that tells which "render-page" that should be used to
show it.
  This means that the -editor- (the CMS) is pretty static (it has lots of
"add-on" modules that allow different pricing strategies, of course), but
the -websites- are developed with more logic (also in PHP), they aren't
simply a dumb display of the structure and articles in the CMS.

What I'm suggesting, is that ideally this thing should have some DB-based
CMS "on the side", that allows web-page developers to "fetch" articles,
with maybe some "#fetcharticle secure $params.CurrentArticle as $article",
and this would get article as specified by the URL ($params) from the
database, and put in $article. $article is of Article class, having
methods like "getElements()" to get all elements, "getElement(int
which/String namedElement)", "toHTML()" for dumb rendering etc.

Just an idea..

And here's another, while I'm at it:

Make the URL parsed something like this:
http://dontcare/webapp/template/extra/path/info?param1=2&param2=3

Webapp is natural, since that's how Servlets are specified. "template"
defines which template to use as renderer/'category template', maybe
simply "name-mapped"  (e.g. directly specifying a template located in e.g.
WEB-INF/categories/, with ".wm" appended), and "/extra/path/info" is given
as $pathinfo to this template, as well as all the params in $params.

If extra-path-info was "secured" (e.g. doesn't contain any ".."s), it
could be used both directly as a template-filename (with path), starting
form WEB-INF/templates/, being included from the "render-template", or it
could be used as a cool mapping into some CMS structure in a zillion ways.
Or, if the site was small enough, forget about all that, and just use the
first element, "template" to fetch template directly..

The idea is to make a whole set of possibilities open from the start, w/o
constraining the system too much.

| >
| > So, as far as web developers are concerned that's it pretty much. It
| > seems simple, and it is really. That's the beauty of it, I think.

It sounds cool, but.. What about PHP? I mean, there's probably some reason
why it started out as a simple "Professional Home Page" language, and've
ended up as "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" with _tons_ of stash.

But it's not quite what you're making either, maybe? It's not primarily a
PHP-killer, but more of a Q'n'D website-maker..?

-- 
Mvh,
Endre Stølsvik               M[+47 93054050] F[+47 51625182]
Developer @ CoreTrek AS         -  http://www.coretrek.com/
CoreTrek corporate portal / EIP -  http://www.corelets.com/