Songhay KB Data Manager Represents New Songhay Enterprise Data Client
The Songhay Knowledgebase Data Manager concludes a years-long and quite unpleasant journey toward the most effective data management application produced by me. The next move is to document how this REST-based, AJAX client works.
This last push was a rewrite for PHP and SQLite—after abandoning a Windows Forms client and SQLite. I should have worked on the PHP/SQLite design first—and I am very ready to beat myself up about trying to get a Microsoft solution to work correctly with Open Source stuff—but there was a danger in building this application before PHP 5 was released—released on DreamHost.com, my current hosting provider.
The few remaining people in my life who wonder about my whereabouts—and why I sound like I am asleep in the middle of the day when I answer the phone—should understand that deep concentration sent me into the depths of trying to do what I perceive as relatively new. My perception sees very few people using PHP objects, SimpleXML and XSLT files to send XML over HTTP as a REST-based “Web service.” The accepted practice is to write everything in Ruby, Java or Python and let one language rule them all.
My design goal is to build most the user interface in XML to make it as platform-independent as possible. The most specific parts of the application are in agnostic XML while the most generic parts are in JavaScript and PHP. The task for the years ahead is evaluating any new client technologies (like Windows Presentation Foundation or XUL) to see how these generic expressions live in these environments.
So I am sure there is a very successful Smalltalk programmer who wrote their generic code in Smalltalk back in the 1970s and is spending their programming career discovering how they can rewrite their old code again with “new technologies.” This rewriting/translation job sounds “boring” to most cowboy coders out there. But the fun part for me is visiting new technologies with some kind of blueprint and working models in my back pocket and evaluating new technology by measuring it against my hard-earned experience.
It is like being a musician who agonized for years in the studio—and all we want to do now is play the same song on tour over and over again—until, of course we get tired and then we rinse and repeat…
Also these data management issues should be relatively predictable and “boring” so a cool brother like rasx() can get back to other forms of creative expression.