[forwarding our conversation with Marcel about the best use cases for
Remote Object Persistence to the list]
On Jun 1, 2006, at 8:28 PM, Marcel wrote:
I could probably write a Confluence plugin that makes a refreshPage
method available via XML-RPC or SOAP which would do the job, but we
are straying into 'when all you have is a hammer, every problem
looks like a nail' territory...Confluence has a fairly full-
featured RPC interface available which would be the logical choice
for implementing an editor like this. We are proposing workarounds
for what is really a very good system because our solution doesn't
match the target. I understand why - the aim of the project is to
get a good example app for Cayenne's ROP - but if we pursue this
path we are going to end up with something rather awkward which
won't make the feature look very attractive at all.
My preference would be to move to a target which is better suited
to the tool at hand. Cayenne provides for direct DB interaction,
making 'loosely wrapped' applications (in the sense that one can
operate on the DB without having to crowbar in under the
application) a much more suitable target. Anything which is written
in an interpreted Web language - such as PHP or ASP - will be
amenable to editing via Cayenne ROP because all the data is stored
in the DB. Confluence seemed, prima facie, like a good target, but
it has (IMHO) turned out to be too sophisticated. Cayenne deals
with databases, not applications. I am not fussed what the target
is, but given that we have a hammer, it should be a nail. I can
think of a couple of targets off the top of my head - Joomla! open
source CMS, phpBB bulletin board - but I think it would be a good
idea to ask the dev list, or even the user list.
All real life systems are sophisticated, I don't see this particular
problem by itself as too bad to turn us away from the Confluence
implementation. However I agree with the bigger point - if we are
building something intended to be used as an example, we'd rather
choose a good one. I am not psyched about an interface to a PHP CMS
either - I am still to find a PHP user who'd agree to run Tomcat on
their server.
From my experience most systems that are using solutions similar to
ROP (and early ROP adopters) are either client programs automating
some business tasks, or applications that need to manipulate visual
data in a way a web browser can't (think Java2D, picture management,
maps, games and such).
The simplest thing would be to do a fake app from the first category.
The cool thing would be to do something from the second or a mix as
it would demonstrate why a Java client is preferred to the web UI.
Just recently I did a prototype for a client using Piccolo
visualization framework [1]. It allows you to display object graphs,
do zooming and panning and moving things around. So we can do a
simple photo album application for instance.
Let's brainstorm other ideas as well, but we need to do it quickly as
the project time is limited.
[1] http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/index.shtml
[2] http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/applications/
index.shtml#java_piccolo
Andrus
