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).

KOW Framework :: ERP in the works

Howdy all.


I'm the developer for the not-so-known KOW Framework. I'm also the current maintainer for the APQ database bindings for Ada (which is now part of the framework).

I started up codding this framework for developing business applications (both web and desktop) easily. As things have evolved, our focus has changed several times and now we are back to the original idea. :)

Right now we are working with complex Web Applications. KOW Framework has a powerful and high scalable modular architecture. One module can depend on other directly (ie, including the module specification), but you can develop using IoC (Inversion of Control). It allows you to use some MVC principles even though we haven't built it thinking about any of those concepts.

The idea is to make a framework that easy our work for some tedious tasks (such as database interaction, configuration files and page construction). Even though I think we have achieved some of these goals there is a long way to go before we can say it's ready for the general public.

Well, I started using the framework in heavy duty tasks a couple of weeks ago. I'm listing some of it's problems and I intend to fix them ASAP (and then write some decent documentation about it and make a decent public release). But the thing is I'm quite happy with the current status. Even though I've been working all alone and thing has progressed pretty fast. Hopefully we'll have a decent set of Ada libraries for building complex business applications in a short period of time.

For the ones who might ask: I call "business applications" those applications someone who isn't a coder would "implement" using Microsoft Access, or some initial (or lazy) programmers would do in PHP.

The vast majority of programmers would usually go to Java or .NET, which I believe not to be fit to any real life application at all (but that's a totally different topic and I'm not messing with it right now).

ERP and CMS are excellent examples of what I call business applications.

Trac vs Redmine

Tenho usado o trac por um baita tempo... muito contente com ele até que eu decidi mudar meus repositórios de svn para git.


Vi que não fazia sentido manter os módulos do KOW Framework (antigo AdaWorks) em um mesmo repositório git. O subversion é muito legal no lance de ser orientado a pastas, mas o git não segue essa idéia.

Além de me oferecer opção de um download muito menor por repositório, sem incluir módulos legados nem código não suportado, essa abordagem do git também me oferece maior segurança. Posso escolher quem faz o que e aonde; sendo assim, posso misturar repositórios públicos e privados em um mesmo servidor, sem muito trabalho.


Migrei e amei o git; rápido, super fácil de entender, completinho.. só que... bom... agora meu trac não consegue mais listar meus repositórios... . Nunca pensei que isso me faria TANTA falta!


Googlei, googlei e o que eu acho? Redmine! Já tinha esbarrado nele antes, mas ele tem 2 coisas que me deixaram bem contentes: suporte a git e multiplos projetos! Tudo o que eu precisava!

Vou instalar o redmine correndo no meu servidor e ver se me dou bem com ele... sendo o caso migro tudo para ele e, finalmente, concluo a mudança do AdaWorks para KOW Framework! :)