tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6240223.post8245175601267006437..comments2021-06-14T05:01:29.924-04:00Comments on Smart Disorganized Individuals: Composinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01739889615635395138noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6240223.post-62925102138760456732007-12-07T12:38:00.000-04:002007-12-07T12:38:00.000-04:00Hi myname (whoever you are)thanks for the comments...Hi myname (whoever you are)<BR/><BR/>thanks for the comments. <BR/><BR/>GeekWeaver started because I needed to create a bunch of similar static web-pages in a place where I *didn't* have access to a CMS. (Corporate documentation on a private intranet so I can't link, unfortunately.)<BR/><BR/>Obviously, in a lot of cases, when you do have a CMS running then that would be more appropriate. <BR/><BR/>As you intuit, the big issue for GW is that you have to regenerate the whole site each time you make a change, which is a pain. (Though I have some ideas for this ...)<BR/><BR/>The biggest publicly visible site created with GW is http://giselazevedo.com/ - and note that I make no claims to be a good visual web-designer or have CSS skills; I certainly need to improve the templates on the next revision. :-)<BR/><BR/>Nevertheless, that site was considerably easier to make with GW than if I'd simply made and maintained the HTML pages by hand in a text editor.<BR/><BR/>One of the nicest things about GW, from my perspective, is that a multiple file site is kept in a single source file. So, apart from the images, that artist's site is kept in a single OPML outline. (If it wasn't clear, the GeekWeaver source-code is OPML and meant to be edited in an outliner. The plain-text version is useful for quick examples, and to illustrate but you'd be unlikely to do serious work with it.)<BR/><BR/>Because of this, I believe that the value of GeekWeaver is that it's going to help bring a unity to the diversity of languages that are currently needed to make interesting dynamic web-sites. <BR/><BR/>Even the smallest dynamic site can involve juggling several PHP files, external CSS and Javacript libraries, perhaps XML configuration files, or SQL to set-up the tables in the database.)<BR/><BR/>With GeekWeaver you can bring all these together into a single outline; and rely on a common way of defining reusable abstractions that can cover more than one language the same time. So, for example, a single parameterizable block can be defined which, when evaluated, produces a table definition, a PHP5 class definition, and a separate javascript object constructor. All in separate files and directories.<BR/><BR/>In a way, you can see GW as being a generic macro pre-processor / code-generation tool for all the other languages you are going to use in creating your dynamic web-site - or any other software project. I'm hoping GW + outliner eventually becomes a kind of cheap "language workbench" where it's easy to knock up your own external Domain Specific Languages. The languages you define will be restricted, but as they'll all be variants on "define a tree of data with labelled subtrees" I think they'll be convenient enough for a lot of purposes.Composinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01739889615635395138noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6240223.post-42476068114234740412007-12-07T11:10:00.000-04:002007-12-07T11:10:00.000-04:00All very ingenious, but I'd like to see more about...All very ingenious, but I'd like to see more about the kind of web site for which the Geekweaver functionality would be appropriate.<BR/><BR/>A lot of sites are created visually using authoring packages like Dreamweaver; others use a CMS, giving more scope for automating the process but less for individually crafted pages.<BR/><BR/>Geekweaver appears to move further along that spectrum, but it isn't obvious how dynamic the resulting site would be. To change the text of one page, for instance, would it be necessary to change the input file and then re-create the whole site? <BR/><BR/>I think you should make a site, preferably for a client, to demonstrate Geekweaver's functionality in a concrete way, and show that the effort of learning its fairly idiosyncratic (not to say cryptic) notation would pay off.MyNamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00239673132379955014noreply@blogger.com