[Solar-talk] Change to Solar system assumptions?

[Paul M Jones]

Hi everyone,

Since its beginning, Solar development has been very much an extension  
of how PEAR does things.  PEAR assumes that there is one one shared  
library for all applications and projects; sometimes the shared  
library is for the entire server, sometimes it is for all the projects  
for one user on a server, but "shared everything" has been the  
foundational assumption.  Even if you have multiple projects, PEAR  
expects they will all use a common library set.

The Ruby on Rails crowd, and their imitators in the Symfony and Cake  
projects, have a different approach.  With them, you have one self- 
contained project system, and no references to anything outside that  
system.  If you have multiple projects, you have multiple separate  
library collections for them.  This means that core libraries are  
usually duplicated across projects.

Over the past few weeks, I come to believe that the Rails (et al)  
approach is the more effective solution for web application projects.   
I think that Solar, while still maintaining itself as a PEAR-library- 
style framework, should start assuming that it will be part of a  
project-specific system, not a server-wide system.

There are a few implications of this change in approach:

* The PEAR-style distribution of Solar as a library set should not  
change; you should still be able to `pear upgrade Solar` for PEAR  
compatibility.

* There should be a *second* distribution mechanism: a downloadable  
"project directory" with the full project structure already in place,  
Solar in the "source" and "include" directories, the bootstrap file in  
the "docroot" directory, and so on.  This will make first-time setups  
much easier.

* The binary `solar` CLI tool should *not* look through the server in  
various places for its config files.  Instead, it should look in the  
project "config" directory.  (You can still specify an alternate  
config file with --config.)  (The same would be true for the bootstrap  
file -- it should look in the "config" directory.)

Those are all the changes I can think of that would apply with the  
"project-specific" assumptions (rather than "system-wide" assumptions).

I'd like to hear any and all criticism of this proposed change to the  
Solar assumptions.  I think we're all doing our projects this way, but  
I want to make sure I'm not missing anything.


-- pmj