[Phpgroupware-developers] Next Generation Framework

[Dan Kuykendall]

I mentioned this a week ago on this mailing list and figured I should 
update you all on the progress.

Progress has gone splendidly!
We have really got this code moving in the right direction.
Heres a run down of the new stuff:
* Multi-language support added and uses gettext
* If gettext is missing stuff then it can optionally do translations 
using babelfish.
* XML-RPC support
* Preferences system
* Admin screens
* App submenu's
* op history (shows you the last 5 places you have been in the app)
* Nicer setup screens using tabs
* More xslt widgets
* Docs are starting to slowly appear

Interface Layer:
I broke out the parts that take the resulting XML and pass it thru XSLT 
and to the browser and moved all that to an interface class. This also 
included things like handling login, logout and final error handling. I 
think wrote an XML-RPC version of the interface class and things worked 
out great. I wrote my XML-RPC interface from scratch for the new 
framework, so its very nice and tight and fits perfectly. I will soon 
embark on writing a SOAP version of the interface class, and it should 
be possible to create any number of interfaces.

The nice thing about this is that once past the interface class 
everything else happens along the normal process, such as the ACL 
checks, language, preferences, hooks and everything else. The app 
developer also doesnt have to do anything different whatsoever. So long 
as the apps functions use safe_args and return arrays as is the standard 
in the new framework, then everything else is handled transparently and 
safely.

More details can be found at http://www.kuykendall.org/phpgroupware/

I encourage everyone to take a look and give me feedback. The code is in 
the phpGroupWare cvs tree in the proposal-branch

|cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/cvsroot/phpgroupware login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:address@hidden:/cvsroot/phpgroupware co 
-r proposal-branch phpgroupware

cd phpgroupware

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:address@hidden:/cvsroot/phpgroupware co 
-r proposal-branch admin addressbook api calendar skel wcm |

For those with coding skills, looking at the code its far more 
enlightening than using the demo or reading the docs.

Dan Kuykendall