[Solar-talk] Change to Solar system assumptions?

[Jeff Moore]

Hi,

I think one consideration is that deployment and development directory  
structures have different needs.

For example, during development, I prefer to break things up into "our  
code" and "other people's code".  I don't want either of these to be a  
subdirectory of the other, because it makes day to day searching  
through code harder and slower.  At development time, I can use  
include_path to stitch together code from my project directory and the  
PEAR repository directory (other people's code).

At deployment time, I can resolve the include_path segments and just  
put everything in a single directory tree.  The PEAR installer is good  
for this, although I suppose you could do it with svn:externals if  
your directories were setup well, or if you wanted to use one  
svn:external for Solar.php and another for the Solar directory.

The kink is the webserver doc root.  I guess the Solar way is to alias  
a public directory into the docroot.  But, I would prefer a merging of  
public directories, rather than a unique directory per library.  PEAR  
installer can do the merging of public directories at deployment time,  
but there is no web server equivalent to include_path that searches  
multiple directories for http://www.example.com/resource to make a  
multiple directory development structure usable.  (is there?)

Jeff


On May 17, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Paul M Jones wrote:

> 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
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