[REBOL] Re: Interesting Article on repurposing software
From: bry:itnisk at: 29-Oct-2003 12:55
>>Behind the scenes, we can generate whatever we want, but from an
>>interaction perspective, what is the best solution or the most natural
>>way to work with this kind of information?
>The problem is not generating data from a customer's input, the problem
>is working with data that a customer has elsewhere. It could be a
>database, it could be twenty thousand word files they've got lying
>around.
By the way, this all makes me think of something I was considering
adding into the website generation part of our product.
Websites have the possibility of having different modules, for example a
mime-type module which analyzes various xml formats and returns the
mime-type for the xml document, so that if you have a file with an rss
extension that is RDF 1.0 you get the proper mime-type back.
One module we have returns folder structure as xml, this then gets
consumed by the front-end display module.
I was thinking that I could make a rebol generation module, basically
cause it might be a cool way to build the structure for other stuff
later:
So for example if one went to
http://mysite.org/rebollers.php?page=filebrowser.php&mappath=rootfolder&
submappath=stuff
(the website generation app allows you to generate either php, asp, or
aspx based sites)
it would give you the folders files, etc at the location of
http://msyite.org/rootfolder/stuff
something like
Rebol[Title: "Generated FolderStructure
http://msyite.org/rootfolder/stuff"]
Rootpath: http://msyite.org/rootfolder/stuff
Folders: ["folder1" "mycoolfolder"]
Files: ["file.xml"]
Resources: ["file"] ; files can have resources found in a folder at the
same ;level with _files in the title, so if file.xml has a resource it
will be ;found in a folder at the same level called file_files.
Fmx: true ; if the folder has a file found in it called index.fmx it is
used by the filebrowser module to put in welcoming text for that folder,
and to point at resources specifically used by the folder.
Other types of xml documents, data sources, modules etc. when consumed
by the rebollers front would return variant rebol scripts. So that for
example a vcard xml format would return the information for a persons
vcard in rebol consumable format, calendar information the same, etc.
A very old, beta version of the products generated sites can be found at
www.mediamaxx.biz
Here's an example of the filebrowser module in display format:
http://www.mediamaxx.biz/oio/assembler.asp?TITLE=Schemaer&mappath=First_
project_web&page=Filebrowser.asp&submappath=xsd
anyway, if websites were common that did this - which of course they
aren't as yet ;) , would people here find it a good tool? If so, does
anyone have any particular wants for what kind of rebol should be
returned from the following formats:
1. rss newsfeed
2. excel xml workbook
3. a blog calendar, showing posts for various dates of the year.
4. an events calendar, showing upcoming events.
Also in discussing the mimetype module above, where it returns the
mime-type of a resource, one of the things it does with vcard for
example is return a vcard in the vcf structure employed by most
emailers. Currently I'm working on a maillist service which converts
emails to xml, & posts them to a site. If one gets an xml file that has
been converted from email, should one have the possibility of requesting
it output as email? Should it be output as email by default?
