Hi Geoff,

I'm relatively new to FarCry, I've only been working with the product for about two 
months, so your detailed answers really help me get a feel for where FarCry is coming 
from and where it is going. 

Keep up the good work; I'm looking forward to the Technical Whitepaper.

Thanks,

--Nathan

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Geoff Bowers
Sent: Fri 5/7/2004 10:34 PM
To: FarCry Developers
Subject: [farcry-dev] FarCry's Past (was Re: FarCry's Future?)
 
Nathan Mische wrote:
>>Extending the "core" is pretty damn easy (whether you mean 
>>extending core objects or creating new ones, it's the same 
>>concept anyways).
>>Basically, I'm not sure what work could be done on the core to 
>>make it easier to use.
> 
> I agree, the COAPI is very easy to use and that is the direction I would
> like to see the rest of the FarCry code base move towards. The
> documentation says that FarCry has a few "rough-edges," it's these rough
> edges I'd like to see polished up. 

FarCry is actually a very mature product that has been in the market for 
many years.  However, like many mature Enterprise solutions it's 
accumulated some detritus along the way as things have evolved. 
Although it would be ideal, it's often not practical to go back and 
rework earlier code -- if it works...

Custom tag calls in Core are often a legacy of some code being ported 
from pre-CFMX code, or CFMX 6.0 code (where the CFC's had some issues). 
  Ultimately, we'd like to move to a completely component driven model 
-- incidentally in many instances you will find that custom tags can 
often be found calling CFC's and so you're seeing a migration of the 
coding style.

Also, we had libraries of custom tags to hide the complexity of building 
and calling CFCs in the early days.  Although this is something I'd like 
to see eradicated from core, its certainly something that will be 
continued in farcry project code like the webskin.

> For example, why is the COAPI called
> via the fourq custom tag library at some points in the code? Why not
> just call the fourq object directly, as is done in other parts of the
> code? Why is the login functionality handled by a custom tag in the
> navajo tag library? Why not the security library? Why a custom tag at
> all? When I was initially digging into FarCry these are just a few of
> the questions I had. 

Specifically re FourQ.  It was originally written as an independent 
library during the NEO alpha/beta.  MM had something called "greystoke" 
and I was toying with ideas.  One of my experiments was to basically 
port Spectra to use FourQ instead of its standard COAPI -- hence some of 
the familiarity in the naming.  Maybe fourq should move into FarCry core??

Security?  Security we wrote originally to replace Netegrity's 
SiteKiller product that posed as advanced security in CF5 and below.  It 
was a custom tag library, ported to CFC's.  Again another thing that 
needs a bit of spit and polish.

> So I guess my question about the future of FarCry is, are the custom
> tags here to stay, or is the entire code base moving to a component
> based architecture? If there is an effort to move more of the code base
> into components, and I hope there is, what can we do to ensure that
> everyone is on the same page? There are differing opinions on how best
> to leverage components, even how to code them, so which ones are we to
> follow in core development? 

Custom tags... to be used more and more in the webskin and areas 
non-programmers might be found.  Always considered to be optional. 
Custom tags in core... we're working to gradually remove everything. 
And you'll see progressive and subtle improvements here each point 
release.  By and large we are concentrating on making project work 
independent of core changes -- ideally you shouldn't need to understand 
anything in the core except for the CFC API.

> These questions are not meant to be a troll... I'm a very big fan of
> FarCry, I just want to see it keep getting bigger and better!

Keep the questions coming.  I'm almost finished a draft Technical 
Whitepaper (keep getting distracted!).

-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/

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