James, On 19/01/2010, at 10:36 PM, James Buckingham wrote: > FarCry takes the approach of giving you the tools that allow you to > setup / manipulate the black box which is core to suit your project.
I'd disagree that FarCry is a black box at all -- it's kind of the opposite of that. First of all its open source, so you can see exactly what is going on. If something is not right, or needs to be improved the committers are actually very responsive. You only have to look at the change log (http://fisheye.farcrycms.org/changelog/core/) to see how active the trunk of the code base is. Secondly, most of the framework can be overridden within a plugin or project. By overridden I mean you have control of model properties and their metadata, views and functions of existing system content types, formtools, libs, forms, rules, and configs. Not to mention you can configure the webtop and most subsystems such as security, friendly urls and so on. You should never change core files directly if you can help it. But then the framework is structured such that you should never really need to make that sort of change. > In some sense that's a good thing because it gives you a decent > platform to work up from and build your custom content within. However > if things, for whatever reason, need to go outside those tools > (external datasources mixed with FarCry content, storing of temporary > data etc.) then I can see us maybe having management issues here. It's true in these instances that FarCry may not be able to help you as much -- you might have to build something, just like any other framework ;) There's no reason not to supplement your installation with another framework if that suits. FarCry has a lot of integration points for bringing external content into its view layer. In truth we do this less and less these days, just preferring to write custom functionality directly into our FarCry projects -- FarCry Core is a framework after all. For example, something we launched recently http://vancouver2010.olympics.com.au is FarCry end to end... and it provides for a lot of weird and wonderful integration including: automated synchs to Amazon S3 CDN, 3rd party results feeds (xml and pdf), event scheduling, and more. For example, last year we launched http://tv.unsw.edu.au/ and it is FarCry end to end... including its own message queue(!), and direct interfaces with iTunesU, YouTube, Akamai, Amazon S3, Wowza streaming server, LDAP, external databases, transcoding servers (hooked up via python), and more. > The other application frameworks act as basic "template" to help > organise your business logic, HTML etc. in a standardised way. It > leaves it up to you to organise the rest of it. So greater flexibility > but the starting point is a blank canva so no webtop, database > management etc. so obviously more work intially to get it up and > running. And more work to maintain. You could always ignore the webtop for example and write your own administration interfaces in the same way other frameworks require you to. But why? It's simply incredible to tap out a 20 field content type with a bit of metadata and instantly have a full blown administration interface for it, complete with relationships to other content types. Not to mention all the view has to offer; super smart caching, inheritance, auto pagination, navigation, etc FarCry does certain things the FarCry way -- if you follow that way then you get a huge amount of heavy lifting done for you. If you don't like the FarCry way then you are starting from scratch and you might as well choose the framework that appeals to your sensibilities. > I'm find though that there is more community support for the > application frameworks than FarCry. Do you mean documentation? Support in this forum and commercial support offerings for FarCry are actually pretty good. Obviously commercial support is something that costs -- but for many teams its good to know that there are companies at the end of the phone should you need a hand. > For example, I know that we're > going to need to do some quite complex form wizards for this > application yet I don't really know where to find tutorials for say > "Creating basic / advanced custom frontend forms using FarCry Core > Tags". It tends to be that you need to look at the existing code in > the plugins / core to work it out. Yup we could always have more documentation. It would help immensely if folks could outline what documentation would be most helpful. Then maybe we can focus our efforts. All the best, -- geoff http://www.daemon.com.au/ -- You received this message cos you are subscribed to "farcry-dev" Google group. To post, email: [email protected] To unsubscribe, email: [email protected] For more options: http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev -------------------------------- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/farcry
