[Webware-devel] MiddleKit thoughts

[Jack M. <ja...@xi...>]

I'm starting to flesh out ideas for a new application, and so I was
brushing up on the parts of Webware that I hadn't used last time (with
vorbis.com).  

MiddleKit seems to be the biggest part I didn't play with.

In the current ideas for the new application, I am thinking of LDAP as a
backend (since essentially what I'm doing is a web interface to a
directory).  But I think this train of thought applies elsewhere.

MiddleKit seems to be very easy when you don't to worry about the
database details.  But when you have a storage system already in place
and need the middle objects, it doesn't really help.

Searching the mailing list for this I found:

> >How can I use MiddleKit on such already existing databases? Do I have to
> >convert them somehow? Do I have to build additional tables using MiddleKit
> >and then merge them somehow?
> 
> MK is a big project with a lot of aspects. In order to more easily tackle 
> it, I pretty much ignored the issue of supporting existing databases, which 
> is by far, MK's biggest weakness.
> 
> MK itself would almost definitely have to be modified in order to make it 
> work with legacy databases in general. I can give hints and advice if 
> someone undertakes that task, but it's not on my own list.
>
> - Chuck

In the vorbis.com site, I implemented my own middle objects.  I am quite
unsatisfied with them, since they duplicate a non-trivial amount of
code, and in the interest of time, I didn't factor it up or out or
figure out a better way to do it.

So now I want to figure out a better way.  I'm interested in hacking in
this area to clean up vorbis.com (and icecast.org once I launch that on
webware) and to implement the icecast directory service for the new
version.

Has anyone put any brainpower towards this already that I can jump in
on?  Chuck mentioned he had some ideas... what are they? :)

I figure that having some base class that implements the basics is
obvious; all my middle objects for vorbis.com had .store() .load() and
.update() functions, which did what you expect.  I had basically two
types of these.  Those that had sub-objects and those that didn't.  For
instance, a SoftwareNews object had a reference to a Software object
that the news was for, etc.   The code to implement that that slightly
different than the trivial case.

So, has anyone collected ideas, or does anyone have any fresh ones?  I
suppose I should re-familiarize myself with EJBs and other similar
systems.

jack.