It seems to me that we already have a system for integrating the various engines, it's called a 'programmer'.
Seriously, I think the time and effort would be better spent on developing a set of 'best practices' for engines so that they have a consistent interface with the rest of the world. If we all conform to a reasonably uniform standard then a lot of the problems go away. Right now I would opt for cutting and pasting rather than have to deal with service discoveries and all that nonsense. The fact that I can't figure out what you guys are talking about regarding web services & all that (only having a superficial knowledge in that area) suggests that the solution will be complex and confusing to the point where it may make engines very 'un-rails-like'. _Kevin On Sunday, March 05, 2006, at 8:47 PM, Jay Levitt wrote: >On Sun, 5 Mar 2006 11:41:06 +0100, mauro cicio wrote: > >> > Better would be things like Bill Katz's recent post on defining >>a common >> > DSL for authentication. >> > The service registry becomes Usenet and the Rails wiki. >> > The protocol becomes "authors talk to each other". >> > The pointer is Google, and the naming convention is decided by >> > the authors for any given service... >> >> I am not familiar with Bill Katz's work, I'll check it out. > >The basic idea was "let's have all the authentication engines/plugins use a >common domain-specific language". That way, an engine that depends on the >presence of authentication doesn't need to search a registry; it can just >use the One True Permission Syntax and whatever engine is installed will do >the work. We've already started down this road, as I believe all the >current auth schemes create @current_user. I wouldn't imagine that any app >author would install multiple, conflicting auth engines, so I don't see a >need for a service registry. > >> Actually the whole topic started from your statement: >> >>>> Another thing to think about: You want the engine to be easily >>>> extensible without folks having to modify the actual engine files, or >>>> cut-and-paste huge swaths of code. > >Oh, God, what have I done! :) > >I was just musing that the engine should be written with lots of small >routines, so that it's easy for end-user-developers (not other engines) to >override specific methods by redefining them. As James pointed out, >UserEngine and LoginEngine could do this if they were refactored. If each >user_controller.rb action were a series of function calls and a CONFIG-like >hash of strings, rather than inline string manipulation and business rules, >it'd be easy for a given app to change only the desired behaviors and >strings. > > > >_______________________________________________ >engine-users mailing list >[email protected] >http://lists.rails-engines.org/listinfo.cgi/engine-users-rails-engines.org -- Posted with http://DevLists.com. Sign up and save your time! _______________________________________________ engine-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rails-engines.org/listinfo.cgi/engine-users-rails-engines.org
