[Fwd: Tosca widgets, only half the battle]

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 11:20 -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 12:41 -0400, Luke Macken wrote:
> > On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 11:03:38AM -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Forwarding to fedora-infrastructure-list soit canget more exposure and
> > > > discussion.
> > > >
> > > > -------- Original Message --------
> > > > Subject: Tosca widgets, only half the battle
> > > > Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 12:27:36 -0400
> > > > From: John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>
> > > > To: Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com>
> > > > CC: tcallawa at redhat.com, lmacken at redhat.com, mmcgrath at redhat.com
> > > >
> > > > After hacking away at MyFedora and producing a lot of ugly code in the
> > > > process I finally sat down the last two weeks to organize everything
> > > > into a framework make it much more extensible and have patterns for
> > > > people to easily create content.  Most of the technologies are
> > > > solidifying into my head and I have been working on hashing out an API
> > > > design behind the user interaction design I had started with.  The issue
> > > > I am running into now is the fact that Turbo Gears and related
> > > > technology come from a monolithic design and adhere too stringently to
> > > > the Model/View/Controller design pattern.  This is really an issue when
> > > > your models, views and controllers can come from different applications
> > > > or even different servers.  MyFedora is of course a mashup of different
> > > > tools and does not fit the, I'm grabbing data from a single database and
> > > > displaying it via a self contained template, mold.  What I need is a
> > > > complete plugin system where a person can write their own self contained
> > > > controllers, templates and static files which then drop in and are
> > > > loaded on the fly, while integrating with the global project.
> > > >
> > > 
> > > Do we want the myfedora app to be coded in such a way that it works with
> > > lots of technologies?  or do we want to define a standard that the
> > > technologies can implement to make it work with myfedora?
> > 
> > I'd like to see us re-use and be compatible with as many existing
> > technologies and standards as possible.  I don't necessarily see any
> > value in re-inventing our own.  That is, unless we have a sound reason
> > to?
> > 
> > luke
> 
> Exactly, I would want a standard way of doing things at least in the
> MyFedora plugin context.  This is why I didn't want to get away from
> templates and controllers (or something else that will be standard for a
> long time).  Ideally someone who knows how to write a TG app should be
> able to write a plugin with a little glue code added and files shuffled
> around. 

I should also note the widget component for looking at quick data on the
main page is a separate issue and I for one would like to be able to
display data from any framework on any site there (such as EJB's or perl
apps, yahoo and google widgets, etc.) through use of standards like
OpenSocial and just plain iframes.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>