SenseHofstede.nl » caws

CAWS: The End

Sense Hofstede — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:15:09 +0000

Maybe you’ve seen my previous posts about CAWS, which was meant to become a very flexible CMS, and wondered why nothing seemed to change at its projectpage at Launchpad. I couldn’t find the time to work at it and didn’t feel like it. I’ve got a lot of different things to do. Creating good CMSes is probably something that should be done by more experienced people. Thus I decided to stop it. I’ve requested a removal of the project here: https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/31961

This will probably cause my karma to decrease a lot, since a lot of it was generated because of the Blueprints of CAWS. Blueprints give a lot of karma.

Storm

Sense Hofstede — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:04:21 +0000

There has been a lot of discussion about Launchpad not being completely open-source. I don’t mind, but others do(although I’d really love to use/see parts of Launchpad).

The one part that Canonical did release was Storm, an Object-Relational Mapper. The definition Wikipedia gives is:

“Object-Relational Mapping (aka ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in relational databases and object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a “virtual object database” which can be used from within the programming language. There are both free and commercial packages available that perform object-relational mapping, although some programmers opt to create their own ORM tools.”

It is, in plain English, a way to make lineair stuff from the database object oriented, and make an easy way to display the relations between it. Launchpad uses it for example for teams and their members.

I’ve been looking at Python as a web programming language a lot lately and I even think of making CAWS Python, with Storm as a part of it. But I don’t know what the other two would think of that. But it sure looks promissing and I think it can be a great language.

The only problem is that I couldn’t make mod_python to work in Apache. DotPy files are still offered to be downloaded when I try to access them at my local server(read my own computer). When I’ve found a sollution I’ll post it at this blog, since I couldn’t find anything that worked. I’ll also post some code when I’ve written something with Storm. But first I want to finish the website of Project Paragon and a part of the school website.

The website of Storm can be found here: FrontPage – Storm.
It contains a not that clear, but interesting Tutorial.

CAWS

Sense Hofstede — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:35:07 +0000

While trying to get the authentication part of Project Paragons website working I’ve been thinking about CAWS. As you may know is CAWS a flexible CMS system I’m working on with a friend. I want to explain in this post about the ideas behind this thing. An important thing in the development of CAWS is Launchpad and it is already registered there, although the main parts are still just ideas, mainly because of the Blueprint functionality and the bazaar branch, which allows use to share code on an easy way. You can find the project page here.
The idea behind the CMS is to create a platform which can be easily used by others for their purposes. The basics are provided by a registry, database drivers, theming system and module system. This module system reads files from a directory and checks if they’re already installed. If no specific module is requested the module which is set in the database as the default module will be used. Via the function $module_system->readData($module_name, $module_part) data from all modules can be accessed. Via a dependency system a module can check if other modules are installed. If they aren’t certain parts of a module won’t be accessible or the whole module can’t be installed, until the dependency is satisfied. The Admin Control Panel also uses the same module system, but gets its modules from another directory. If you want to and have access to the database from another server you can even put the admin control panel somewhere else.
More information is going to be revealed when the basics are done, but I don’t expect to have much spare time to spend at CAWS, since I want to finish the website for Project Paragon and I’m also busy with triaging bugs for Ubuntu and, of course, school.