Re[2]: Known MacOS programmer about WO/EOF

[Manuel Guesdon]

Hi,

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:03:53 +0200 David Ayers <d.ayers@inode.at> wrote:

 >| Dennis Leeuw wrote:
 >| 
 >| > David Ayers wrote:
 >| > 
 >| >> What we need is developers that already know how EOF/WebObjects and 
 >| >> can spend time working on it.  There are a few that are trying to get 
 >| >> into it.  But they often lack the experience and resources (reference 
 >| >> implementations) to really get the correct implementation.  I'm sad to 
 >| >> say, that I simply don't always have the time or even the know-how to 
 >| >> help them out, even though I try when I can.  Another problem I see, 
 >| >> is that some of the work to squeeze out more efficiency has made the 
 >| >> code much harder to read, making it even harder for new folks to help 
 >| >> out. I'm still hoping to find a way to remedy that, but to do that 
 >| >> I'll need to find some time to do some real benchmarking myself to 
 >| >> make sure we don't loose measurable performance.
 >| > 
 >| > 
 >| > On the otherhand releasing let's say a 0.1 version might create 
 >| > attention which then might attracked more developers. I don't think any 
 >| > developer expects a 0.1 version to be a version to base a production 
 >| > application upon.
 >| > 
 >| 
 >| I've had often had this discussion.  I also often had discussions on IRC 
 >| about how much someone has been wasting their time with GDL2 because 
 >| they expected this or that to work or this or the other class to be a 
 >| fundamental part of GDL2.  I have the feeling that frustrating the folks 
 >| which are willing to take a look by premature releases is worse than the 
 >| status quo.  On the other hand, I do not want to seem like I'm hijacking 
 >| any project here.  

I agree on this. May be we should make a release but with pointing out 
what is covered and what is not covered but this require time....


 >| In my view, the issue is not so much that GDL2/GSWeb are hobbyist 
 >| projects.  If they were hobbyist projects, I think the implementation 
 >| would be much "cleaner" (as in easy to learn from and extend).  But 
 >| instead they are a foundation for certain production implementations. 
 >| This means that certain hacks remain to make sure production code 
 >| doesn't break.  It means that it's filled with logs to identify issues 
 >| in when debugging in production scenarios which obfuscate the actual 
 >| code.  It means that there is a lot of dead code that can presumably be 
 >| easily reactivated if deemed necessary in a production environment.

I haven't the same eye on this (but 'm not completely objective :-)

There's probably old/unused code because I'm a little conservative on this and 
as I'm not sure who use gsweb I usually try avoid breakin things, even obsolete 
things. May be we should try to create some kind of 'communauty' so we can see 
if we can remove this or that by asking the communauty.

About logs, there's a mecanism to avoid them completely (NSProcessInfo 
processInfo -setDebugLoggingEnabled:NO)  or partially (application debug set) 
but yes there's probably some logs we can remove. A problem on this is that 
core/base+gsweb+gdl2+application is a complex thing. core/base implementation 
still change from time to time, gdl2 too, gsweb also sometimes. Have tests 
suite is a way to improve debugging and validation process

I have no idea now of About 'hacks' for production code but I agree to talk 
about about this kind of thing if/when you or someone else find one as I also 
prefer a clean validated code. 

There's also changes I'd like to make: change the way dynamic element are built 
(it's still the way WO 4.x did) because it's complex, not very readable and 
hard to debug.

[...]
 >|  Manual, could float 
 >| these ideas to see if we can agree on a general plan?

Yes; so we have the following things:
o remove old/unused code
     when someone identify this kind of code, it can send a message on gsweb 
list or fill a 'bug' report and we can check if we can really 
remove/modify/clean it.

o about logs, we can individually remove logs which seems unecessary. May be we 
can discuss on the first logs one want to remove to find a generally accepted 
guideline.

o about dynamic element rewriting, I'll ahev some time to work on this so I'll 
expose what I'd like to do, next we can discuss about this and after that start 
implementation.

o about test suite, there's a Testing/DynamicElements application I've started 
to write to verify dynamic elements. All ideas and code are welcome :-)

o about documentation, do you have idea on how to start working ont it ? My 
english is poor so writing understandable documentation is not easy for me 

o web site: make it look like GNUstep one and see how we can use it to show 
that the project is alive and progressing....

Another ideas  ?

Manuel