Having read through some of the recent stuff I suddenly realised a fundamental point of the original conversation I had with Stefano that kicked off a lot of the discussions might have been missed, so I am going to try and note it here just to be sure, to be sure.
This all started because a little while back I did try and have a go at writing a panel to go with a couple of contribs I wrote, but for the life of me, although I could bash out some simple code, I could not get my head round FormMagick. I've also tried to look at FM code when debugging and it gives me the shivers. Now, I can hack a little HTML and CSS. I could have bashed out a panel using them without much trouble. But I am busy and have no time or inclination to try and get my head round something as ancient as FormMagick. I had a lot of long chats with Filippo last year at FOSDEM. FormMagick was just one of the reasons they went their own way. They wanted something that might attract devs with some general coding skills that are easily available today. HTML/CSS/JS are clearly popular. Lets leave out PHP as we know how awful that is.... ! If you are writing a web panel for anything else today then they are the sort of skills you would normally expect to use. There are an awful lot of devs out there with at least a basic working knowledge of them. Neth wanted to try and tap in to that pool of developers, and they have had some good successes with that strategy. Also if you are a PHP coder then learning some basic Perl is not too hard. Stefano and I kind of tossed around the idea that keeping all the good stuff about Perl in SME was a good idea, but could we somehow abstract the web part, so anyone with some basic web coding skills could bash out a simple contrib and panel without having to become a Perl monk ? In other words could an idiot like John Crisp manage to build a simple Perl contrib (not rocket science if I can do it) with a simple HTML panel to go with it ? Filippo had mentioned to me last year that that they had looked at Cockpit as a potential server manager - note the wording here http://www.projectatomic.io/docs/cockpit/ "Cockpit is a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser." Hmmmmm..... reinventing wheels & all that. A kind of ready built manager panel system. With Samba 4 support and docker support built in. Got to be worth a look then..... We wondered if it would be possible to integrate that with the esmith Perl actions. So the Perl still does all the heavy lifting. But not having to really touch it for the server-manager itself. Two separate parts that communicate with each other (at least that’s how I envisaged it) So the point of the exercise was never to prove that one panel system or framework was better than another. Nor was it to say definitively we should use cockpit. We were really trying to find solutions to a couple of issues we (SME) have had for a longtime. Lower the barriers to entry to SME as a developer by making it easier to write panels and contribs in languages in common use today, and hope that we may pick up new developers as a result. Rewriting the server-manager with Mojolicious is not a 5 minute job whichever way we look at it, and would it be therefore be easier and simpler to utilise something off the shelf if something was available ? And that is where it all started. I hope that may clarify some of our thinking, and possibly things that may have got missed in translation. It also does no harm to look at alternatives at this point in time. So please all have a play with stuff as it comes (Stefano has VMs of his Cockpit system if you want to have a play - just email him) and lets see what other ideas we can get on the table. Fire away if you have questions - Stefano is the technical guru on the cockpit stuff - I'm just here to try and give a non technical overview of thinking. B. Rgds John _______________________________________________ Discussion about project organisation and overall direction To unsubscribe, e-mail discussion-unsubscr...@lists.contribs.org Searchable archive at https://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
