On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 16:23, Chris wrote:
> Thanks for the Apple WebObjects/EOF references. They should be very useful in
> evaluating parts of the current app-server work of the GNUe project. If it
> turns out that GNUe is not salvagable, this will help in evaluating /
> developing alternatives as well.
Being the co-maintainer for GNUe I would love to hear dialog on our
lists or irc about where there are issues so we can help fix them. It
is disappointing to hear people rule out GNUe when as best I can tell
they never dialoged with any GNUe developers.
That said we had an appserver that went strongly down the
object/relational mapper. I think for real business application
development this is a mistake. There are severe problems with it. It
is one of those in "theory" it should be the next best thing since
sliced bread, but in reality it just doesn't live up to the hype. I
think there is a very solid middle ground between full objects and nasty
SQL that can be achieved. I believe this is where GNUe AppServer is
trying to fall.
> This project looks interesting although it seems somewhat limited in
> functionality at this point compared to Apple's "complete" EOF framework. As
> example, in the area of concurrency, it has no sessioning or 'notification'
> system yet. See section 1.6 of the Modeling user guide. It does serve as a
> basic O-R bridge ("Business Objects"), but I would point out that this is
> only one layer of the "middleware" software stack. In comparison, GNUe is
> attempting to build the whole stack. But perhaps Modeling could be used in
> conjunction with other Python classes to provide the same thing that GNUe is
> aiming for..
Certainly we have looked at things like twisted, pyro and others. We
are not against using other Free Software to help us get there faster.
Believe me.
> I guess this whole "Enterprise" / n-tier thing is sort of a cutting edge area
> in software development. Lots of people have their own ideas what it all
> means, implementations vary, and the terminology is sloppy. Frankly, it's
> pretty frustrating overall. I guess in my view, given current understanding,
> this is what the ideal software stack looks like:
Yes. A lot of it is "theory". This is good and bad.
> 1.) Client software: Either human interface software (web application server
> (PHP,Perl,Zope), DHTML + JS XML-RPC, standard GUI, handhelds (Palm,PocketPC))
> or a web services client.
This would be GNUe Forms (currently its "standard", but has some
prototype web interfaces as well)
> 2.) Remote Protocol Interface (XML-RPC, SOAP, CORBA, RMI, etc.): provides a
> means for clients to call business methods.
GNUe Common has somethign called GNU RPC that wraps all of these but
RMI.
> 3.) Authentication / Session Interface
We have discussed this a bit and are still torn on what exists that we
might want to build off of, we know we don't want to write a security
methodology we want to piggy back on one or more. We currently in 2
tier mode use the existing Database Security models, for N-Tier we piggy
back on the transport some.
> 4.) Business methods (or 'procedures'): interact with the business objects to
> do real-world tasks. (Example: Add_Person)
GNUe AppServer will fit this role.
> 5.) Business objects: O-R bridge, transactions, caching, integrity and
> consistancy
We are not fully convinced at this point this is a solid idea. We think
that some mapping and exposure needs to happen, but not on a 1 for 1
scale. Such object exposure will happen in GNUe AppServer.
> 6.) Data interface: abstraction of database or other backends
GNUe Common does this well today.
> 7.) Backends: database servers, LDAP, email, etc.
GNUe Common has support to plug these in today.
> * Note: 2 and 3 may be partly inter-related.
> ps.) If anyone else can shine some light on this confusing topic, please do.
A number of folks discuss these ideals daily at #gnuenterprise
irc.freenode.net because it is critical to our future. We currently
have one FTE in Austria working on AppServer. There is an American
company that is considering putting multiple FTEs onto GNUe in order to
make it their framework for a new Warehouse Management System.
--
Derek Neighbors
GNU Enterprise
http://www.gnuenterprise.org
derek@gnue.org
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