[Catalyst] Squatting::On::Catalyst

John Beppu john.beppu at gmail.com
Wed Jul 30 02:27:40 BST 2008


On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 5:21 AM, Daniel McBrearty <danielmcbrearty at gmail.com
> wrote:

> my 0.05 (possibly a bit OT) :


Off-topic or not, I think these are interesting and valid questions.


> I looked previously at a few ways of adding forums etc to the site
> using 3rd party code, indeed there are many possibilites (some perl,
> some not)
>
> The thing that was always a sticker for me was getting some kind of
> logical integration, ie:
>
> 1. letting users keep existing member and login creds


Now that composition and embedding of web apps is becoming a reality, we
have to start anticipating needs like this.  For example, the documentation
for an app that's built to be embedded could state that:

   - It expects a user object to be in its session's "u" key.
   - The app will expect to be able to call the ->name method on this user
   object.  (Some apps may want more...  others less...  this is just a
   hypothetical example.)
   - If that key is undef, the app will assume the current session is not in
   a "logged in" state.

 I think being up-front about login policy would be enough to share users
across multiple web apps joined together as one cohesive unit.

2. being able to cross ref to other parts of the site eg. for a
> certain node, easily have a "discussion" link, and the reverse link
> from the forum


I haven't thought about this problem much at all.  My initial thought is
that (again) the app that's going to be embedded would have to be written to
anticipate this kind of need.  Perhaps the app-to-be-embedded could provide
a configuration option for the embedder to fill in with an appropriate
value. This option would control how links would be generated in key
portions of the app.

I haven't yet seen a way to do this that looks easier than doing it
> from scratch (well, lets say some heavy porting of existing db
> structures and code from existing stuff ...)
>
> IMO getting these kind of features right are where the real meat is.
> Looking at the summary, I guess that's not what the focus of this
> project is, so if this is post is basically just noise, please forgive
> that.


No need for apologies.

The questions that you bring up have definitely crossed my mind.  It's true
that my work so far does not address these questions at all, but at the same
time, this kind of work is a sort of prerequisite for these questions.  (You
couldn't even ask questions about mixing sites together "cohesively" if you
couldn't mix them together at all, right?)


--beppu
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