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

[Andrew Hanenkamp]

On 1/20/08, Dobrica Pavlinusic <dpavlin at rot13.org> wrote:
>
> 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?


The virtual-models branch is working, but the documentation is weak and
there are certain pitfalls that are not obvious when you get into it. It
also doesn't give you much right now unless you want to programmatically
build a model:

my $model = Jifty::Model::ModelClass->new;
$model->create(name => 'Person');

my $column = Jifty::Model::ModelClassColumn->new;
$column->create(name => 'name', storage_type => 'varchar(100)', 'mandatory'
=> 1);
$column->create(name => 'color', storage_type => 'varchar(15)');

my $person = Jifty->app_class('Model', 'Person')->new;
$person->create( name => 'Jesse Vincent', color => 'blue' );

There's no GUI. I have placed CRUD in front of these two in CAS+ (possibly
my private branch, I haven't had time for a merge down in a few months),
which works, but it isn't very pretty yet. There's also several fields, like
valid_values, validator, canonicalizer, that are not implemented yet.

I'm using the virtual-models branch on one production machine, but I'm not
sure I'd recommend it to everyone. I would love some help hacking on it
though. Since I have to divide my time between two major projects (one
Jifty, one not) and a myriad if itty-bitty projects, I haven't ended up with
as much hacking time on Jifty, particularly virtual-models, as I'd like.

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?


As I mentioned, I have two major apps. One is in Jifty, the other is running
on top of Drupal. It is our plan to use the Drupal site to provide much of
the front-end to our other work so that our clients don't have to leave
there. My hope is to provide a Drupal analog to Jifty's regions (i.e., use
Jifty's JavaScript and some sort of server-side work in a Drupal module to
help implement the non-JS fallback) to provide the glue that will stick
these two applications together. I haven't really gotten time to work on it
yet, so that's still just a theoretical implementation. ;)

On another level, I can synchronize records between the applications using
Jifty's REST.

Cheers,
Andrew
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