On 14 October 2010 07:33, Michael Allan <<a href="mailto:mike@zelea.com">mike@zelea.com</a>> wrote: <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> What integration problem are you trying to solve? It's difficult to visualize, at first glance, where a DSL might fit for that purpose. </blockquote><div> Let's separate two things out. A vision of distributed LD for general open political emergent debate, and deployments for a particular group, or application area. We could call these vertical and horizontal markets for short. I'm interested in the former, but see it a a better strategy to bootstrap this on the latter. If we think therefore of getting a good quality trial up in a vertical market, where we get a sponsor to pay for things like consultation, user support, face-to-face meetings, and graphic design / UX work. In this scenario, we can look at Votorolla as a Java based backend for LD that can sit on a single server. The integration I have in mind is therefore to integrate Votorolla as a Java project, with OCO as a Ruby on Rails project (which at the moment has simple voting), and another Java project which has a good backend for secure digital currencies. The richest, and most elegant way to integrate these three things I feel would be to wrap each in a higher level DSL written in Groovy, with the aim of making it simpler to write custom organisational structures. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> The larger system is physically distributed across a network of independent hosts, including many pollservers and codebases (not all Votorola) and multiple host/component types (not all pollservers). That's too loose of a configuration for a DSL to come to grips with, isn't it? Ad hoc network protocols are probably the best glue for that purpose, at least in the beginning, when we're still prototyping and experimenting. </blockquote><div> At this stage I am taking a careful look, the base decision is to use web services as you indicate, however it does seem that it is difficult to really get this going for a number of soft reasons. Each of the projects likes the idea of web services, but as it is never a priority, they don't really get round to implementing them or supporting them fully. There is always another feature of bug to fix in their code base. The centres of gravity in each project pull them apart, and people like me trying to integrate these tools around practical projects which need custom front ends created find it increasingly difficult to pull the pieces together. The other approach is to fork each of the code bases and bring them together on a single server. However then you are faced with the problem of maintaining the overall integration, and you end up with these big CMS type projects, which is a no-no. My latest thinking on this problem is that it may be easier to achieve a productive integration in the area of DSL's and the JVM. My guess, and that is all it is at this stage, is that this area is technically good enough (speed, robustness, unerlying concepts), socially integrative enough (programmers from different languages will be able to get involved), and cool enough to attract good developers to the project. As a practical example - I am not going to learn Java, to get involved in coding Votorolla, but I would learn Groovy, and it looks easy enough and interesting enough for me to be able to wrap existing Votorolla Java classes in a DSL which I can start using in projects. The same goes for other projects, and if that applies to me, it will apply to a Ruby programmer, or a Python programmer. However I am not a Java programmer, and I am not familiar with the innards of Votorolla, so i would value your thoughts on this. What I'd like to do is start hosting Votorolla on a good virtual host, and start work personally on creating a wrapper for it in Groovy (eventually leading to a DSL), so that we have the added flexibility of being able to create Ruby on Rails like sites (ie in Grails) with embedded Liquid Democracy. The added benefits of being able to work in the same technical domian as the digital currency and legal projects I've spoke of are just a bonus. </div></div> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Votorola" group. To post to this group, send an email to votorola@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to votorola+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/votorola?hl=en-GB.