Recent blog entries for davb

cm:

It seems you are lacking in the knowledge of basic database concepts. I certainly am not the person to explain it, but I know there are plenty of useful books on how relational databases work, and the theory behind it. For sure, SQL is not the most sophisticated query mechanism, but most relational databases do offer ways to consolidate information and get you what you need. Generally if you have a table of states, and another table of cities with some sort of mapping, you would create a state capitals view that returned the information you need. If this isn't your cup of tea, hire a DBA, who lives for this kind of excitement. The rules of how to efficiently organize data in a relational database have to do with data integrity and consistency.

It looks like content management in OpenACS is finally going to be improved. I have been lending moral support as well as lofty design goals, but unfortunately I have been to busy to write any code. I have tested some experimental ideas to better integrate the code and database, especially templates. We will probably end up publishing the templates to the filesystem, and definitely will offer an option to publish content to the filesystem. Eventually we will offer XML publish with XSLT templates. Not necessarily for rending of web pages, but for RSS and other XML output and export to other systems I think its the way to go.

I am making slow progress working on the edit-this-page2 spiffy content management application for OpenACS 4. While I am working on it, I am also learning about the templating form builder, which is a very powerful, but confusing engine.

Besides that I am still thinking about SOAP and XMLRPC in AOLserver. I checked validator.xmlrpc.com and serveral people have validated various versions of AOLserver. I suspect these are based on my ns_xmlrpc code, but I can't prove it. So I am wondering, who are these people? Not too many people have contacted me about using ns_xmlrpc. It's a half an implementation that was never really fully tested. After I found NSSoap, and TclSOAP, i stopped working on it.

TclSOAP is the only project still being developed. It would be easy to modify it to work with AOLserver. This would require changes mostly to the file names, and writing a native AOLserver transport.

The greater challange is getting AOLserver to play nice with standard Tcl packages. There is a great number of handy tools that could be used if AOLserver properly initialized the global Tcl environment variables in the interpreters. I am surprised noone seems willing to work on improving AOLserver in this way. Without this, AOLserver will never be a real part of the Tcl community.

I guess it will have to wait until a paying client really needs it. Noone really seems to interested in solving these problems in their spare time, me included.

Hi. I used to be tdxdave, but I am now davb!