Re: an outsiders view

On Dec 16, 2005, at 5:15 PM, Nathan White wrote:

Hi Nathan,

> I have been using Binarycloud off and on for about 4 months now and  
> I am very impressed with how quickly I can get results. The core is  
> really solid. I do have a few concerns about some of the API that I  
> thought I would share. Some of these may come from my lack of  
> knowlege and experience with Binarycloud, if this is the case  
> please ignore.

> The Conf Class is awesome! Why isn't this incorporated more into  
> the Node class? Instead of having setParam and getParam why not  
> have a node automagically create its own conf namespace so all  
> nodes have an easy place to reference;  a uniform interface. In  
> addition with node creation the Conf class could be used to  
> autocreate a tree manager so you could crawl the tree and pre and  
> post process nodes in this fashion.

The Conf class was rewritten some time ago. It then introduced this  
concept of paths.

This thought has crossed my mind too. I'm a bit concerned about  
speed, but i like the idea...

This format could be used for all sorts of info.

eg. instead of;

$parent = $this->getParent();
$related_node = $parent->getChild('someid')

one could do:

$related_node = $this->getRelatedNode('../someid');


> I also think the Event class is great. I just think its a shame  
> that it isn't being used more, Nodes should fire events when  
> entering the initialization/process/render steps and fire events  
> that other nodes can listen for so they can respond without having  
> to know the parent/child relationship. This would make Nodes  
> insanely powerful.

I haven't used the events ever at all. But i think i see were this  
could go. Elaborate please...

> Having Smarty/Templates integrated so closely to a node sucks in my  
> option, if you want to output to a template create a template node,  
> or have a "/template" namespace in Conf. Render should have  
> settings like HTML,SVG,PDF,JPG etc

Agree here. I would too like to seperation between nodes tree and the  
rendering tree. It is workable, but can become a bit messy. Not sure  
myself how this would work. There is allready an RenderManager but i  
am not sure you can just add a renderer. bc is pretty much  
intergrated with smarty.

> The public interface to a node is way too big.

Yep

> I have already implemented alpha code for myself with all the above  
> including a setCondition and runCondition method on the Node class.  
> These methods allow one to add conditional nodes inside a node that  
> point to an NDF file, and automatically creates the child node and  
> runs init and process as well.
>
> Speaking of NDFs, I hate XML config files, they are great for  
> porting configs from one environment to another but to work with by  
> hand is painful. I have patched my Binarycloud install so it runs  
> native php config files, I find it much easier to deal with.

Personally I do like XML and I do not see the diff in editing php  
array's or xml files. Especially since the via the xml one can use  
<node:include>. Which would become a function or something in php.  
messy to my opinion.

> My though with this is to create a simple web base interface for  
> handling the editing/creation of config files. In this fashion we  
> could then create resources and the config manager could  
> automagically manage them and validate that all required parameters  
> are filled and valid.

yep. I think the idea was to get the conf data into a db. an  
interface to that could be dont...

an interface to edit ndf's should also be possible... there are not  
that complex (params, templates, template params, contains &  
includes). But that might change if you need to hook node up in  a  
different way than a simple tree. Not talking about the sepeartion of  
Node and Rendering.

> I have many more ideas but I don't want to get carried away. I  
> thought I would share and see if this could be of any use to the  
> direction of Binarycloud. If so I would be more then happy to  
> contribute to the project, else I may create a branch if that is ok.

any idea is welcome... so please get carried away..

don't know about a seperate branch, the current one needs improvement  
as it is anyway...

are you using php 4 or 5?



Bas

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