Nexista Web App Framework

I just tagged Nexista 0.2.5 because I made a significant change to how sitemaps are processed (though the change does not break backwards compatibility).

Gates should now include an http method attribute, like this:

<map:gate name="x-hostgroup-delete" role="yodnsuser" http_method="post">

If they do not, they will default to get, and as I mentioned in the first paragraph, posts to gates that have defaulted to the get method will also be processed. However, if there is a post method gate, it will be processed instead.

This change was inspired by Sinatra, and it turns out to be a helpful change. Gates are now a lot simpler and concise, without urls getting too complex.

TODO:

• Add HTTP methods (get, post, put, delete) to sitemaps as gate attributes
• Support chaining XSL templates together (as opposed to the current xsl action which inserts its output back into flow)

I've recently learned about a lightweight web framework for Ruby called Sinatra. I'm not sure if it is described as MVC, though. If it is, it would be the closest MVC I've found to Nexista.

Sinatra supports some pretty cool stuff that is similar to how Nexista uses sitemaps. ince its written right in ruby instead of XML, its easy to understand right away.

Nexista uses PHP to create PHP versions of the sitemap. I've considered using an XSLT template to generate the code version, perhaps something like that could transform existing Nexista applications into sinatra applications.

This style sheet is long, long overdue, but I'm finally writing it. Yeah!

What does it do? It takes an MDB2 XML schema and transforms it to MySQL database creation commands. Yes, it is very cool.

I'm only about halfway through, but I should be done soon. At the moment, I'm working on it in the Established Sites repository, but it will get moved to Nexista very soon.

I've been learning about model-view-controller (MVC) application frameworks lately thanks to the awesome Perl-based Catalyst project.

So far I'm able to make these comparisons:

• Sitemap = Controller
• Datasource = Model
• Templates = View

Its not that simple though, as there is no object relationship mapping in Nexista, so the datasource / model comparison is very rough.

After wrestling with XSL, HTML, and XHTML for weeks, I finally decided to simply create a Nexista extension which uses the Tidy library to fixup the output buffer as either HTML or XHTML. So far, its working great. I'm using it with PhunkyBB and its working fine. Hopefully this will make it a lot easier to switch between plain HTML 4 and XHTML output without having to edit any stylesheets!