On 18 Dec 2008, at 15:27, Christian Grobmeier wrote:
Hi all,
I sent an E-Mail before a while about the PIWI project. Meanwhile a
lots of improvements have been done and I would like to point you to
the project again.
PIWI is a transformation framework written in PHP. It uses lots of
ideas and concepts from Cocoon and esspecially Forrest. Its current
project site can be found here:
Project: http://code.google.com/p/piwi/
Docs and Demo: http://www.piwiframework.de/
Its completly implemented under the Apache License.
Current features are:
- Crawler for static content generation
- Forms (easy create web forms and assistants) & Form Validation
How do you justify the decision to implement forms support *and*
static generation. We've always been of the opinion that they are
mutually exclusive. Forrest does support forms, but not out of the box.
What happens when forms are submitted? Where does the data go?
I did look at the site and found a demo, but no explanation of what is
actually happening.
What validation mechanism do you use? that is how do you define
validation rules?
- Internal PIWI-Format has been changed to a subset of XHTML
Cool - that was the big problem with your previous implementation (for
me at least). A move to XHTML means that the XSL in our existing
plugins can be more easily reused.
- Generators and Connectors (Generate XML from within other
XML-Structures; Connect a Generator to Databases)
I'm a little confused by your choice of names here. Looking at the
demo the generator page displays data formatted in a particular way
(i.e. a data table), there is no indication of what is actually
happening. Is a generator the same as what we call a generator
(something that creates XML for further processing, or is it a
serializer (something that generates an output).
- Authentification
Again, how do you justify this alongside static generation?
You can see most features in action at http://www.piwiframework.de/.
Several things have to be done, but at the moment we consider the
project as feature complete. We plan to wait a while and fix occuring
bugs or feature requests and then walk towards a version 1.0. We also
would like to write some more user docs.
It would be great to get some feedback of you guys. I think PIWI would
perfectly fit to the Forrest project and we might be interested in
this. I strongly believe that Apache needs a web framework in PHP. If
you guys think so, let us know. Any help or ideas here are highly
appreciated.
I'm really not sure. Forrest is *not* a web framework, it is an XML
publishing framework. Cocoon is a web framework.
I'm confused by what Piwi is. Is it a web framework or a publishing
framework. If it is a web framework what does it give over the many
other web frameworks out there and why would Forrest (a publishing
framework) be interested?
If it is a publishing framework then why does it have some web
framework features?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm genuinely
trying to understand the objectives of Piwi and why you believe they
align nicely with Forrest. Suffice it to say, it looks like you've
done great job with Piwi.
Ross
Ross
