Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Two Wishlist Items and jarring my thoughts

Author:Dan Lyke
Posted:11/10/1998; 9:37:16 AM
Topic:First message
Msg #:290 (In response to 283)
Prev/Next:289 / 291

I hope that the conversion from mail pages to the discussion server doesn't trivialize the conversation. This message, for instance, is to a slightly larger audience, and I wouldn't have sent it directly to you because I need someone who thinks more like I do to jar my thinking loose...

Thank you for "Two Wishlist Items", but I'm stuck on a couple of points, and since I suspect it's a "when all I have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" issue of perspective and being locked in my ways of thinking, I'd especially appreciate the input of the non-Dave folks here.

On the first wish, "A common cross-platform scripting API": Isn't DAV the extended file system that should deal with server side storage of scripts and objects?

Aaaand, I'm having trouble understanding why XML-RPC is needed to supplement CGI? Is removing the naming of parameters that important (parameter names seem to be the only additional info I'd need to build an XML-RPC to CGI script, which I may do as an exercise)?

Those two would at least be a start.

On the second wish, "High-level web content runtime for Linux", some background: Newwwsboy is the package (Perl script) I wrote to run Flutterby (http://www.flutterby.com/), a web site inspired by Scripting News, with an e-mail interface.

I'm two revs behind on the uploads (e-mail me if you want to run it, right now I provide my few users a *lot* of handholding), but as it sits on in my development directory it has templates, macros, rudimentary glossaries (although I'm still trying to figure out a good interface for updating them), but rather than trying to render an existing database I assume that the web site is the database and it's how I store and link the incoming data that counts.

You've convinced me that I need to build some sort of generic change detection mechanism and store data in a couple of different types of repositories (standard Un*x e-mail files, SQL tables, XML and such) so that I can render to other formats, but I still don't grok why the object heierarchy is so much cooler than a flatter collection of tables. If someone out there can enlighten me, I'd really appreciate it, all the models I'm coming up with are network or relational rather than strictly hierarchical.




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