[Fwd: Tosca widgets, only half the battle]

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 12:39 -0400, Luke Macken wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 09:06:24AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Forwarding to fedora-infrastructure-list soit canget more exposure and 
> > discussion.
> >
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > Subject: Tosca widgets, only half the battle
> > Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 12:27:36 -0400
> > From: John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>
> > To: Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com>
> > CC: tcallawa at redhat.com, lmacken at redhat.com, mmcgrath at redhat.com
> >
> > After hacking away at MyFedora and producing a lot of ugly code in the
> > process I finally sat down the last two weeks to organize everything
> > into a framework make it much more extensible and have patterns for
> > people to easily create content.  Most of the technologies are
> > solidifying into my head and I have been working on hashing out an API
> > design behind the user interaction design I had started with.  The issue
> > I am running into now is the fact that Turbo Gears and related
> > technology come from a monolithic design and adhere too stringently to
> > the Model/View/Controller design pattern.  This is really an issue when
> > your models, views and controllers can come from different applications
> > or even different servers.  MyFedora is of course a mashup of different
> > tools and does not fit the, I'm grabbing data from a single database and
> > displaying it via a self contained template, mold.  What I need is a
> > complete plugin system where a person can write their own self contained
> > controllers, templates and static files which then drop in and are
> > loaded on the fly, while integrating with the global project.
> >
> > Before I go further let me describe my design.
> >
> > Vocabulary:
> >
> > Resource - This is the starting point for MyFedora plugins.  A resource
> > is any abstract grouping such as "packages", "people" and "projects"
> > which contain tools for viewing and manipulating data within the
> > resource's context.
> >
> > Tools - A tool is a web app for viewing or manipulating data.  For
> > example Builds would be a tool for the package resource.
> >
> > Data Id - The data id is a pointer to a specific dataset the tools work
> > on.  For example the package resource considers each fedora package name
> > to be a data_id.
> >
> > The way things work are Resources are placed in the resources/ directory
> > and contain the logic for routing requests to a specific tool.  They
> > also contain the master template which is a cause of path problems with
> > the current TG setup (include paths are relative to the including
> > template)
> >
> > Tools are placed in the tools/ directory and are controllers just like
> > any other TG controller.  The exception is there is a standard for
> > including the master template and the tool pulls templates and static
> > files from its own directory.  Tools can register with more than one
> > resource and must modify its behavior based on the resource calling it.
> > For instance the Build tool would be able to register with the package
> > and people resource and depending which resource is being used it would
> > display either a specific person's builds or the build history of a
> > package.  Based on the resource being used the master template is pulled
> > in by the tool's templates.
> >
> > Data id's are simply what the resource passes to the tool and the tool
> > needs to be able to accept when dealing with a particular resource.  For
> > instance the Packages resource would send a package name as a data id
> > and the Peoples resource would send a person's FAS username.
> >
> > The issue here is I need the tools to be self contained but still
> > integrate correctly with the global assests such as master templates and
> > graphics.  Tosca widgets seemed to be the answer until I looked further
> > and found out they are just a higher level display layer than a self
> > contained controller/template system.  It seems to be confusing because
> > it breaks the connection between the controller, data and the display
> > when I want that all to be encapsulated.  Basically I don't want the
> > master page dolling out the data because the master page is just a
> > container to display the tool and links to other tools.  The tools
> > should know where to get their data from.
> >
> > One solution is to use ToscaWidgets as a replacement for templates (or
> > more apt another layer between the controller and the template).  That
> > makes things more complicated and throws away a lot of the concepts of
> > TG controllers.  I guess I am probably just hung up on how I first
> > learned TG and we can just document around those issues.  But another
> > thing to think about is stuff like WSGI.
> >
> > What do you guys think? Given my design and goals such as the ability to
> > display tools on the portal page, what is our plan of attack?  How do we
> > concoct a plugin system to make it easy for others to create integrated
> > content while really just concentrating on their bits and not the wider
> > integration infrastructure?  Are there systems/libraries out there that
> > already do this? Tosca is only part of the solution because it only
> > deals with encapsulating display and is mostly geared to generic widgets
> > like lists and not complete pages.  I would like to have a framework
> > that is simple, focused and easy to use.
> 
> You mention that you're running into issues with TurboGears v1.0's
> "monolithic design", which makes various assumptions about how your
> application is going to be implemented.  I agree that this may not be
> ideal for the MyFedora environment, which is why I think basing this on
> TurboGears v2.0 is the way to go.  Being built on top of Pylons, which
> does not make these strict assumptions, it will allow us to have much
> more control over how our application stack is structured.  Since
> TG2/Pylons leverages the WSGI standard (which we are starting to adopt
> in our infrastructure deployment already), it will allow us to change
> any part of our own stack at any time, without taking apart the whole
> framework.  If we treat resources as WSGI applications/middleware, it
> will make it trivial to plug these into our framework, package them, and
> develop them in isolation.
> 
> ToscaWidgets is extremely useful, but not at this low of a level in our
> framework design.  I think that TW will be great for the high-level
> re-usable widgets that can potentially use various MyFedora
> resources/tools, but for core MyFedora resources, I think basing them on
> top of the WSGI standard will be the most flexible solution.

I was thinking that but I am still not sure what WSGI is.  Right now it
is just a magic term to me.  Can you describe them in terms of
controllers right now?  How does relative paths work (for instance with
template inheritance)? Is TG 2.0 stable enough for me to start rebasing
on?

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>