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June 13, 2003
Project ListManager
ListManager is a new project that Seth and I are developing.
It's fairly simple in concept. A simple database of "Items", each item has a category associated with it.
When we're done with it (the web application and the various clients) it's going to be a monster...
We have a few different client / use cases envisioned.
The first is fairly simple - think of it in terms of a simple book database, where you just enter the title (with or without author) of a book you want to buy, read, borrow, etc. Or a CD, or a movie, or a birthday, etc. An "Item" can be anything the user wants it to be.
Each item has a Category associated with it. The Category can be either a root "Item Type" (e.g. Book, CD, DVD, Birthday, To-Do, etc.) or a Hierarchical type (e.g. Book::To Buy, Movie::To Watch, Movie::To Watch in Theater). Hierarchical types will come in handy later.
I have a very nasty (not yet HTML-ified) project description set up at http://www.aland.us/software/ListManager/ and I will be converting the description to HTML, fleshing it out with respect to implementation details, and hopefully starting to write the code, soon.
(The basis for this project is that I wanted to write a Struts (http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/) application. I wanted something simple. And Seth and I got a little crazy discussing the ListManager project I'd mentioned to him.)
The premise here is that I'll write an MVC Struts application, and expose the Model as Web Services. Seth and I will then build interfaces to the Web Services that will allow us to query and modify the database for a variety of purposes.
One of these purposes is a Bookmark Manager. This will be implemented in a fairly simple and straightforward fashion (to start). One of our Categories will be "Bookmark", with an indefinite number of subcategories. Then, we can write a client for each platform of interest (MacOS X, Windows, Linux) that will query the database for all Bookmarks associated with our particular user, format them in such a way that we can open them individually or en masse (using tabs in Chimera, Safari, Firebird, or some other modern browser). The beauty is that the web application (List Manager) does not have to know about any of the more interesting and complicated functionality that the "Domain Client" (e.g. Bookmark application) is going to provide. It has a simple task: Serve "Items" to clients.
That's enough blithering for now. It's late and I'm tired. More info when some actual coding has been done!
Posted by aland at June 13, 2003 12:33 AM
Comments
You should enable trackback pings on your blog. :P
My comments are here.
-Seth
Posted by: seth at June 14, 2003 7:45 PM
Hmm. The URL was stripped from the last comment. I meant to say:
Posted by: seth at June 14, 2003 7:46 PM
Just a note -- the comment above -barely- qualifies as non-spam. :-)
Posted by: Alan at July 1, 2004 8:49 AM