[jifty-devel] integrating/growing jifty apps into bigger ones

[Dobrica Pavlinusic]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 02:59:10AM +0100, pp at kpk.gov.pl wrote:
> continuing on integrating jifty.
> does somebody has some experience how to integrate jifty
> app with other existing applications, as it takes too much
> time to rewrite all of our stuff to jifty in a blink of an eye, 
> and we'dlike to start using jifty and in our new apps, 
> but that needs at least reading data from existing
> databases/tables and making references to thise data
> in new jifty recodrs, dropdowns etc. later we could move, everything
> piece by piece to jifty. any thoughts?

I have integrated jifty with java tomcat application using same database
(I created classes using similar names as built-in Jifty ones and that
worked perfectly coupled with Jifty model with before_create and couple
of set_ methods). It's user management with audit in Jifty which automatically
pushes subset of changes back to database.

Right now, I'm thinking about integrating legacy php based portal with
Jifty, probably using PHP::Interpreter. This is quite sick, but somehow
5 years of development isn't something you can just throw away (one of
requirements is to keep user interface as-is). I did system architecture
for php portal (but didn't wrote actual code for it), so I know it quite
well. It heavily dependent on PostgreSQL (triggers, pgmemcache, stored
procedures) but I intend to keep it as-is and create some kind of virtual
models in Jifty for existing stuff. Part of the problem is that existing
application logic is in php, and I need to keep that.

However, I can rewrite layout engine in Jifty (probably using page
regions for each of php modules), and I actually want to do that to
support nice URLs (and REST stuff which I will get for free with Jifty
dispatchers). Using YUI to provide new layout editor is also nice
possibility. I'm quite happy about YUI update which just got into trunk.

Does this seem sane to any of you? ;-)

I'm concerned about performance (existing portal works acceptably
only when using memcache and php accelerator) since PHP::Interpreter
probably isn't fastest thing in universe.

Idea is to turn php modules from existing portals into jifty actions (and
get additional parameter validation for free). Then I can use memcache on
Jifty side to cache results of actions if needed.

I haven't looked into memcache support in jifty, so I can't really tell
how feasible my idea is with current version, but I would like to try
it.

I would love to see more info about virtual-models branch and/or it's
status... Should I start my development against it instead of trunk
Jifty?

Easier alternative is to write perl code which understand php sessions
(which I have done in the past), but somehow, this isn't magical enough
for this application :-)

-- 
Dobrica Pavlinusic               2share!2flame            dpavlin at rot13.org
Unix addict. Internet consultant.             http://www.rot13.org/~dpavlin