Archive for February, 2005
So there’s this interview with Alan Kay, an old-school Apple guy and frequent denigrator of today’s computers. Jes was talking the other day about how Kay’s metaphor of contemporary apps being like the pyramids - brute-force stacks of blocks made possible only by large numbers of Egyptian slaves - was so depressing for an ambitious coder. What we need is not more pyramids, but cathedrals. But no one has discovered the arch yet.
When the architects of Everything2 attempted to productize their core code (along with some other stuff), they named their company Blockstackers Intergalactic. In the best case, programming feels pretty much just like that: stacking blocks, like a happy or at least distracted kid sitting on a shag rug in the middle of the family room. In the worst cases, it feels a little more like being a slave in Egypt. Big fucking blocks, those were.
So that was on my mind when I concluded my post yesterday. I think I’ve been slacking off on 0.2 milestones because what’s left to do - adding a feature to the admin pages, then adding another one, et cetera - feels very much like mindlessly putting one thing on top of another. Many of the distractions I’ve been employing lately have actually been themed around (hopefully) eliminating some of this kind of busywork. Funny enough, not long ago I linked to one of them - Ruby on Rails, a web framework that promises, and seems to deliver, dramatically faster development of database-backed web apps - as a joke about the other context of “on rails:” that of being bored and having nothing to do but mindlessly move forward. I am hoping that RoR promises the opposite, but there’s no time to waste exploring it now.
Must. Stack. Blocks.
February 17th, 2005
What’s to be done for 0.2, zoomed in a bit:
Better admin - about a third done, I’d say.
Refactored page object - we’ll include db schema and methods for children/hierarchy and permissions right there on Page by default, instead of relying on pagevars and pagetypes. Some other things might shift around as well. This is not started yet.
More permissions UI - If I get ambitious I might want to do something like, say, give the creator of a page the authority to delete comments (at least for some pagetypes). I’ll need that anyway for weblogs when we get around to those, and just generally need to think through how such pagetype features are going to interact with permissions. Help would be welcome on this and I’ll try to rustle some.
We’re behind schedule for Fictionsuit and I have spent too much time fretting about design issues. Need to start stacking the blocks again.
February 16th, 2005
Found this paper on something Drupal is preparing or possibly not preparing, called the Content Construction Kit. I don’t know enough about the technical underpinnings of Drupal to be able to say exactly what’s going on here, for example, but even just the beginning of the next page tells me that there is some useful thinking there for how to extend Cornucopt’s content model out to the next level.
See, it turns out to actually be pretty hard to deal with things like search. So far, searching CoCo has been limited to title searches, but once you do full text search, how do you give users and/or admins a manageable way to say what it’s appropriate to search and what isn’t? Another way of looking at search is from the perspective of application-wiki problems. How do you tell your in-page widget to do something to a given set of pages? And truthfully, even title search is complex - I’ve already special-cased Corny’s database to keep track of what’s a comment so that they don’t appear in title searches. It’s not as if I should have to tell the changes table what every pagetype is, and write special SQL code for them all. And search isn’t the only such problem - RSS feeds are starting to look similarly tough.
So I’m hoping something in this document is gonna save my ass. The hope is that I will end up with an easy way for admins and/or users to define new pagetypes without writing PHP, and in some way consistent with permissions and generally not naughty.
February 3rd, 2005