[Bese-devel] patches for UCW and some questions for ucw-core

[burban at opopop.net]

Attila Lendvai <attila.lendvai at gmail.com> writes:

> > Thanks for the link. Obviously inspired by UCW:) Are there core design
> > differences?
> 
> 
> yes, it started out as an ucw refactor after we agreed with Drew that
> we want to bring ucw in different directions. but after a few hours of
> struggling, i ended up with a fresh darcs initialize and had to find a
> name quickly. wui was born.
> 
> some highlighted differences that pop to my mind:
> 
>  - continuation stuff is not integral part of wui. if you need call/cc
> for a wizard or something else, then use it. the back button? forget
> it. the complex webapps we are building are more like a vnc to a
> desktop application running on the server, with a limited set of
> permanent entry points. you can write your own support for permanent

That makes sense.

> url's. but to be honest, i didn't even look too deep into the back
> button support, so it *may* come later, but i don't care much. some
> more words on why:
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=jquery%2Cdojo%2Cmootols%2Cyui%2Cextjs

See my soon to come post about ucw-core with jquery...

> (dropping the ucw backtracking and frame concepts makes it much more
> robust for sites with higher traffic).
> 
>  - backend abstraction is dropped, it's threaded iolib-only.
> 
>  - much more attention was paid for components, including a meta-gui
> that can work based on the information available from the MOP (and
> integrated with cl-perec for presenting and manipulating any
> persistent data model)
> 
>  - the xml generation is based on cl-quasi-quote
> (http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-quasi-quote/)
> 
>  - better error handling and reporting
> 
> 
> > Some documentation would be nice also. UCW suffers from a
> > documentation too terse to go easily beyond the basics.
> 
> 
> i've pointed out too many times how we don't believe in documentation,
> so i won't do it once again. the point is: don't expect any docs from
> us for wui besides extensive unit tests, and easy to start examples.

Units tests: ok, but explain what you test and expect, and what can go
wrong. "Easy to start examples": ok also; this was where IMHO original
UCW lacked more detailed explanations. I am still not sure what all
the UCW demos were intended for, and if they behave exactly as
expected...

The UCW tutorial from Ties Stuij is quite nice, but it was written
before the ajax branch, so that aspect is missing. The ucw-core
manual takes even more progressive steps to explain the basic ideas
with examples. 

In short, the key for good doc seems to be: simple to more elaborate
working examples, with a lot of explanations. Isn't that like the PCL
book...

Cheers.

-- 

B. Urban