Prototyping the infrastructure and UI together

[Michael Allan]

Alex Rollin (in "Domain specific language") wrote:
> ... the purpose to which I am oriented is building an app that allow
> me to do quite a bit of what the Pollwiki does currently while still
> authenticating and tabulating votes on the pollserver and associated
> systems...

I'm sure you can build whatever you need.  I know you're unhappy with
MediaWiki for the pollwiki, so I'll just underline what's involved in
replacing it.  Although position drafting can be lifted outside of the
pollwiki and freed from MediaWiki (by free-range drafting) without
raising any architectural problems, most of the other functions cannot
be freed in that manner.  The function of poll identification (for
example) cannot be separated from the infrastructure where it is
currently attached to the pollwiki without breaking the architecture.
The reason is shown in this diagram, at the service interface labeled
"issue posting" (which means "poll identification"):

  http://zelea.com/project/edo/overview-state.png

All pollservers have a dependency on that service interface, which is
therefore "visible" to them, and so part of the infrastructure.
However, at the same time, the UI layer is necessarily invisible to
the infrastructure, pollservers included:

   user interface (UI)

          |   visibility
          V

    infrastructure

So you couldn't lift that particular function (or most of the other
pollwiki functions) into the UI layer.  If you wanted to re-implement
it in Drupal, say - instead of merely interfacing to it or wrapping it
- then you'd need to do so in the common infrastructure that everyone
uses.  We'd all have to retool for Drupal instead of Semantic
MediaWiki.  We'd have to talk about the reasons for doing that, what
problems we're trying to solve, etc.  OTOH, the UI work is pretty much
"do your own thing" and we don't have to agree on the designs.

I added more here: http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/vot/vot.xht
Sorry it's so rough.  If we keep going like this, we'll eventually
have it all properly documented.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/