Recent blog entries for tdxdave

Building a web-base content management system is hard. The work isn't necessarily hard, but he decisions are. Mainly, should or should I not include this kitchen sink. There are basically two main classes of CMS that I have seen. Super flexbile, powerful, incomprehensible systems, or simple easy to use systems with few features.

Working on OpenACS 4.5, I was introduced to a new application for OpenACS called edit-this-page. It's goal is a simple, easy to use, and easy to extend CMS. I am working on the next version, and the temptation to add more and more features that would "be nice to have" is very strong. Deciding what is necessary, and what is optional is very tricky. It is also probably impossible. It is better to build a good base that can be extended. OpenACS is a toolkit to build applications. It is a given that there will be code written to customize it. I think this is the way to go. Leave methods to extend and add features available, but do not build in too much.

Well forget NSSoap. It looks like development has stopped on it, and I can't seem to get it to work. I am forging ahead with TclSOAP http://tclsoap.sourceforge.net as the base. I have mainly run into problems with loading standard Tcl packages into AOLserver. We are working on getting the package require command, and Tcl namespaces working, and changing the way Tcl interpreters are created inside AOLserver.

I have pretty much stopped working on nsxmlrpc because of NSSoap. NSSoap is based on TclSOAP which has XML-RPC support built in. So I can get SOAP and XML-RPC in one package.

ns_xmlrpc is ready to go as a generic AOLserver add-on. I fixed it so that it creates any procs it needs that are not already defined. It should be available as a tarball very soon.

I got the Daily Chump IRC bot running on the #openacs channel on irc.openprojects.net. It is a weblog created by logging all the URLs typed into the channel. It's written in Python so I really have no idea how it works. It creates XML files and comes with XSLT stylesheets to transform it into HTML.

Anyway the cool part is that I used the new version of ns_xml to run through all the XML files and convert them to HTML as an AOLserver scheduled proc. Check it out at h ttp://www.thedesignexperience.org/openacs/ircblog/.

Works is starting on turning ns_xmlrpc into a real live OpenACS module. When we are done OpenACS 4 modules will be able to call and provide XML-RPC services.

My main weblog is at my homepage. I use XML-RPC with OpenACS to maintain it. Right now I am working on a small part of the OpenACS 4.x port.