I do almost nothing but the kind of work you are describing, including a comprehesive student record management system for a large California College. I find that providing a custom interface to data is a lot more like static content than dynamic when it comes to design. My apps tend to look more like M$ Access than slashdot.org
So, over time, I've built a set of tools that do exactly what I need. It's an extensible API, of course, so I can add new functionality simply, but it does just what I need. The reason I've never adopted Mason or OpenInteract or one of these [amazing] products is that because of their scope they do far more than I ever need them to. For the same amount of time and learning curve I would spend on becoming a Mason mason I can tweak my own API to be 100% to my liking. All the content-generation code I use is my own. Many people sniff at this and chuckle at another hacker going through the rite of passage of making his own templating system. But the toolkit I use has been built over four or five years now, so if I'm stuck in a rite, well, so be it. Works for me, rather well. I use a light layer of custom stuff built on top of the hardcore public APIs for non-content-generation stuff, i.e. Apache::Session- and DBI-based auth and data-access libraries. I have built an integrated access/auth/authz layer that gives each user a hash of their own permissions that follows them around; I use this to govern the output of the content-generation as to read-write, as you suggested, and logging is built into the write()s everywhere. I've been thinking of packaging up the auth/authz stuff ... anybody care to take a look at it? I guess in general I favor independent component APIs upon which you can build, a la Apache::Session, rather than the monster "Application Servers" ... it seems that you get the same effect but with more control. Of course, I've had the luxury of afew years' experience; someone starting out may prefer a canned solution ... - nick ~~~~~~~~~~~ Nick Tonkin On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Bill Moseley wrote: > I've been looking at OpenInteract, too. I've got a project where about 100 > people need to edit records in a database via a web-based interface. And > I'd like history tracking of changes (something like CVS provides, where > it's easy to see diffs and to back out changes). And I need access control > for the 100 people, along with tracking per user of how many changes they > make, email notification of changes, administrative and super-user type of > user levels, and bla, bla bla, and so on. Normal stuff. > > I'm just bored with html forms. Seems like I do this kind of project too > often -- read a record, post, validate, update... Even with good > templating and code reuse between projects I still feel like I spend a lot > of time re-inventing the (my) wheel. Will an application framework bring > me bliss? I'm sure this is common type of project for many people. What > solutions have you found to make this easy and portable from project to > project? > > > > Bill Moseley > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >
