World: r3wp

I've looked at QM but I did not get it. I did not understand what 
it did. Magic seems to provide some basic gui elements that seemed 
like a quick way to build a website. I'll have another look at QM 
though. 

QM runs on Cheyenne?

Yes.

Chris will correct me if I´m wrong, but I think that´s basically 
the point. :-) QM is a generic framework implementing a Model/View/Controller 
architecture that leaves you free to plug in parts for each, whereas 
Magic! offers a basic set of rigid REBOL web widgets

With QM you can basically build any website, without having to reinvent 
the wheel on the lower level web server technology, while with Magic 
you would quickly run into the walls of the provided functionality

Magic! could theoretically be an easier way to start, learning even 
less HTML, but if you can´t get through its configuration, you might 
as well start with QM

I have to say, that I don't get that MVC concept at all. It seems 
to me, like some academic head came with that model some time back, 
while reality might be elsewhere. Do you really desing your apps, 
that its fits MVC model? E.g. that famous Ruby and other DB "automatic" 
schemas which are supposed be so cool have to be rudiculous to someone 
who actually knows SQL. Soon after you start reading docs you find 
out, that when you get to more complicated DB schema, they only provide 
you with excuses that you can't have everything. Sometimes frameworks 
work against you :-) Not that I would not understand their advantages 
otoh, hence I am asking, if QM is really so usefull? The thing is, 
that I tried to give it a try several times, and I did not know what 
to do actually, but maybe I am extremely stupid for such stuff, and 
am only able to work with plain cgi/fcgi ...

If there is some full example implementation of some site for e.g., 
I could give it a try ... last time I tried was some year ago or 
so ...

You´re mixing up MVC and Active Record, and I vaguely remember discussing 
this before

Not mixing - those relate. Does not have QM as a framework an Active 
record like data organisation?

I do agree it takes time to figure out MVC, and I think the terms 
are too much inspired by a technological point of view. It´s really 
about separating the concerns of the usual stakeholders working on 
websites, or applications in general: the programmer/database designer, 
the consultant designing the business logic, the graphics/UI designer 
and the secretary maintaining the content

Yes, but Active Record is just an implementation of the Model and 
can be swapped out for something else

Basically always when someone thinks this separation is too complicated, 
he is thinking from his own perspective assuming he would have to 
maintain the whole site and hop between tasks

Once you start thinking from the perspectives of very different people 
having to maintain very different aspects of systems, it makes perfect 
sense; and coincidentally also explains many of the problems with 
existing systems through lack of separation of concerns

Would you write 20.000 similar web pages for a web store, or would 
you write one template and store the properties of the goods in a 
database, for example?

I am always thinking from such perspective! My simple tagging system 
completly separates presentation from scripts. In such regards, concept 
like rebol server pages is something I can't absolutly agree with. 
So if QM uses RSP, then where is the separation?

I work with driving comments sections, which tell what kind of handler 
should parse/maintain sections, but without being destructive to 
existing design.

It is not about me not thinking about those issues, it is about finding 
"the ideal one". So far I like Gabriele's Temple for e.g.

.... but - I do rather primitive things. So maybe later with more 
advanced stuff, I might finally "get it"

QM´s Controllers read and write data from Models and plug it into 
View templates, so there you have it

Best MVC example: OSX. The thing is not the separation all speak 
about (Model = Date, View = GUI, Control = App logic) but how to 
get it to work together. And this is (normally) done by passing messages 
between these three.


Like you click a button and a "loadrecord" message is sent to the 
Data part. IIRC the nice thing is, that more than one "function, 
object, ..." can react on such a message.

I would like to see more examples of how this works. I kind of get 
why its nice to seperate tasks on a large scale site but is there 
still an advantage for a small self built/maintained site.

You can with QM, should you wish, only use the Controller.  My (evolving) 
advice would be to learn QM by only using the Controller.

I usually test new features starting there.  That's where the flow 
is and you can do everything within the Controller context.

Even if you chuck the View and Model parts, my Controller whips plain 
CGI : )

am: I'd encourage exploration of QM's source.  Most of the code covers 
mezzanines that address typical WebApp problems.  The philosophy 
is to 'Think REBOL'.

I've gone to lengths to make the source as transparent as possible 
(even if my commenting sucks).

Chris, you could set your color settings to white on white...

{color: lemon-juice;}

Perhaps that is a secret code.  what's the tuple for lemon-juice? 
RGBA = 255.255.00 ?

...meant RGBA = 255.255.0.0

Alan


From your posting on the Rebol-France BB, it looks as though the 
formattng of your AddHandler declarations in your httpd.conf file 
are not correct.

I use these:

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler cgi-script .r

#Following entry added to enable Magic!
AddHandler magic .rhtml
Action magic /magic/cgi-bin/magic.cgi

The Script Alias I use for Magic! is

 ScriptAlias /magic/cgi-bin/ "/Users/peter/Sites/magic/cgi-bin/"

Thanks Peter, I'll give those suggestions a try..

Dunno if this group is appropriate, but we don't have marketing related 
one. Does anyone use some advanced web access analytics to improve 
SEO?

We have basic Google tools, but we were suggested ClickTracks (now 
LyrisHQ). Other product might be NetMonitor ... any experience here?

I now use Piwik. Free and Ok.

Has anyone written a web-shopping cart system using Rebol? So a simple 
CGI api to add/remove stuff to a shopping cart? Felxible enough so 
that it can be integrated with existing web-pages and shopping cart 
content can be forward to different check-out system?

Robert I don't know of any and ask this same question long ago which 
is why I came up with the idea of Rcommerce which would be a REBOL 
based solution similiar to oscommerce.  Many here were vocal about 
it not being something that anyone would trust so I let it the idea 
die.

I do have experience using oscommerce and it worked very well but 
again not a REBOL solution but is at least an open source solution.

Robert, if you just going to forward your items to another check-out-system 
then I thing that is something rather simply to implement via REBOL 
and CGI.  It is when you want to use REBOL to handle the check-out 
system also with the interface to the payment gateway system is where 
I think many people had reservations about using a REBOL solution.

Yes, I know oscommerce (or xtcommerce which is IIRC a fork). I use 
Rapidweaver for Web-Pages so I would like to integrate all this.


The problem I have is, that all these shop system push you to use 
their layout engine etc. There is none I know, that just does the 
non-gui backend part.

Well that was my main problem.  I didn't like the layouts they presented 
either.  In fact this is one reason why I got out of the business. 
 It was costing me to much manual efforts to do the updating and 
I didn't have the time.

I had 14,000+ items on sale and couldn't put another 6000 plus that 
I wanted to put online.  And of the ones I did have online, I didn't 
have my best distributers content and pricing.

I used an oscommerce customer package that I payed for from a service 
which populated my distributers content.  they didn't support all 
my distributors which left me doing a lot of work.

I used Authorized.net as my payment gateway.  That was the plus side 
as Authorized.net is excellent.

I made the mistake of enabling my entire inventory on Shopzilla once. 
 Needless to say I had a LOT of traffic to mysite.  I had a lot of 
order but I had my competative pricing on and ended up losing money 
in advertising costs because of it.

Now, I'm a lot smarter ;-)

;-)

Ok, thanks for all this input. I will think about this a bit and 
see where to go. For me an online-shop system has to be made of independent 
modules.

Layout: Use what you like.

Item presentation: Dead simple integration into existing pages. No 
frills, simple to change.
Shopping Cart: Provides simple API that can be called via CGI
Payment Forwarding: Plug-Ins where to route the payment process