Re: Adobe's RIA Technologies

Aaron Bartell wrote:

You know what would be great? (I am guessing this idea isn't original and
there is probably already something out there) It would be great to have an
application spec that each framework could implement (i.e. simple order
entry application with shopping basket for end customers, internal screens
for "wizard-less" shopping baskets, item looking, pricing module, customer
lookup, PDF creation, email notification, etc). That way each framework
could go through the motions of implementing all of the same features and it
would be much easier to see the complexities of each framework.

Anybody ever heard of such a thing?

I've been wanting to do just this for some time now. I just did exactly that for hand-crafted JSP vs. EGL at DevCon this week. I'd be interested to see where PHP fell in the mix (my guess much closer to JSP than EGL).

I think you'd have to do a couple of things. First, identify and categorize the modules (for example, I'd place PDF creation in the "utility" category whereas I'd put pricing purely in the "application" category). Second, pick a handful of modules to work from. Third, come up with a common database for everyone to work with.

The other thing to address is the amount of RPG to be included in each version and whether to try to make that as common as possible as well. I know with JSP or EGL, the RPG code would have to be completely modular and callable, and so would lend itself very well to such an idea. If, however, you're building a PHP/MySQL variant, calling RPG might be out of the question.

But regardless of that particular caveat, creating a list of modules and categorizing them and then starting work on a common database might not be a bad idea. I wonder if we could even borrow the database from that open source ERP system - is that still around?

Joe