[MG] Mapping Participation in Drupal

[Alex Rollin]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 8:02 AM, conseo <4consesus at web.de> wrote:
> Am Sunday 16 January 2011 schrieb Alex Rollin:
>> http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/data
>
> Thanks for pointing it out, I have bookmarked it. The main problem that I see
> is that they have a quite different focus although their visualization (view)
> has some common ground with Crossforum and we might be able to learn from them
> at least.
> Their site is about visualization of static content after official elections, so
> they can pull all data easily once in their DB and are done. We program a live
> tool which consists only of a bit of glue for a completely open infrastructure
> regarding drafting media, poll server concepts and even the discussion media
> involved. ?Focusing on Drupal only would roll-back the whole perspective of
> Crossforum + open network to a single well-designed free web-frameworkl.

The point of all the modules I mention is that, with the prototype
conditions complete as Mike spec'd it, I would think it would behoove
you to take a look at some mature tools that can munge just about any
feed data.  Maps can be set to refresh via ajax.

<What
> is likely possible and might be interesting is to ask them for cooperation and
> make them compatible with Crossforum, so we share as much code and
> infrastructure as possible.
> In fact this introduces a new use case of a specific kind of pollserver, where
> it is only about exposing the historically fixed and static data of some official
> elections which is about to be visualized in the mapper. Since our effort is
> very generic, this should fit in nicely and be a profit for both concepts,
> visualization of official voting data and an actual voting network. They would
> have to come to us though, since we are more generic, which is pretty unlikely
> in my experience. And they even have to drop their implementation and switch
> to Java/GWT for that, whcih is even more unlikely. You could try to convince
> them though, they would definetly profit in the long term.
>
I am rather certain that the Drupal solution handles more use cases
and is a wider deeper set of tools than what you are making.  If that
makes it more generic, I don't know.  Generic, to me, is different
from "lightweight", which doesn't necessarily apply, though the core
for Drupal is still only 2.5mb.  I told Mike many months ago that I
could build the base for the crossforum prototype app using these
Drupal tools, and without any custom coding except to tweak a jSON
parser for the feed from Mike's custom code.

>> >
>> > There's a rather modern feed parser for Drupal:
>> > http://drupal.org/project/feeds
>
> In general finding feed implementations is not the problem, they are pretty
> standard today. I have had a look at Atom first, too, when thinking about the
> diff feed service, as I might want to use them in a news-reader on my desktop
> for some issues and support for it is pretty standard. For Java this looks
> pretty good: http://abdera.apache.org/
>
> But there is a very serious drawback when it comes to using Atom in a
> crossforum tool. It hits the wall of single origin policy. That way we have to
> use JSONP and although it is more "low-level" it is much more flexible and
> scalable for us since we don't have to xml-parse the data or work around Atom
> and some middleware like Drupal or Abdera.

Feeds is for taking data into Drupal.  It's rather amazing.  It'll
handle feeds from any number of sources, and there's ways of
formatting output of feeds, too, but this module is for import.  It'll
accept almost any data source.  Perhaps you will take a look.  It's
extraordinarily powerful.

>I often like to have a look around
> how others do things and if I can easily reuse open-source code, but in
> Crossforum/Votorola's case I think Michael got it right, by keeping it as
> simple as possible.
>
> Since what we all (not only Votorola) do here is pretty new lands and
> prototyping we don't want to bend around current concepts of web frameworks.
> They are not designed for cross-server web-uis or even global distributed
> networks, but in most cases rather to build some server-side service.

Crossforum is not a server side service?

Drupal feeds is certainly built for taking in data from multiple
services, and it can do it fast.  Replicating this facility seems a
bit ... well, a lot of extra work, like I said.   Other modules spit
the data back out in whatever format you want.

 For that
> reason we cannot even use GWT's RPC, since GWT is originally focused on
> developping commercial web services rather then a distributed web.
> In fact, when looking at single-origin-policy, we even hit the current web-
> browser concepts hard when it comes to opening the web up, since they are
> bound to at least one main client -> server connection. You cannot browse
> ressources which are not stored on a single domain/host name yet.
>
> Have also a look at kio-magnet here:
> http://whilos.blogsite.org where I have proven that you can distribute the web
> and desktop in any way you can imagine when you break the current URL-standard
> and combine that with BitTorrent. This might be interesting even for
> Crossforum, as we can store both the app and parts of the data in a
> distributed shared space then.

I followed up on http://unhosted.org which you might find interesting.
 Moves data processing back to the "edge" on the desktop.

>
> Christian (conseo)
>
Alex



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org