segunda-feira, 17 de maio de 2010

KOW Framework still on the works...

I have been working on the KOW framework for a couple of years now. So much we have accomplished, and then rewritten and finally we are really close of a public release with some tutorials and stuff like that.


So, in order to celebrate that I decided to write a simple overview on the framework and what it is all about. So, here it is.


The framework was designed with simplicity and modularity in mind. Once you have your application up and running it should be straightforward to extend and maintain it. You shouldn't have to worry about versioning much (well, you need some sort of versioning but not as grained as "take the revision #1012023".... a simple "use the release 2.0" should be enough).

Also, memory management is a big concern (after all it is a server based framework.. all users will be using the same memory space on the server).

We did our best to make it robust, fast and small. Yes, being small is actually a good thing. The framework has no tool for handling complex scripts. Neither for processing images or any of the sorts. If you need something that does that you should by all means use GNAT.Expect package for calling other process (which can be considered an ugly workaround but works like magic) or implement your own (or even find a 3rd party) package. You can put this package inside your app folder and you will be just fine.

A more detailed post about the framework and how to use it is yet to be written. Actually, our biggest issue right now is not having a decent set of introduction documentation. It's quite easy to use the framework after you got yourself used to the main libraries (only tree are quite important here: kowconfig, kowview and kowent) but there is no "make a blog in 2 minutes" kind of documentation (which I think is quite possible and easy to do... but I tend to get busy with other things easily).