I'm responding to the koha-devel list as well to ensure that the people most involved with the things Sergey's touched on hear his comments. On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Sergey A Yanovitsky wrote:

Hello Pat,

Monday, April 22, 2002, 11:26:37 PM, you wrote:

PE> Hi Jah, hi PE> thought I'd check in and see what your thoughts were on koha. Let me know PE> what you (and the others working with you) think, okay?

It's a nice system. You guys did lots of work there. :))

But it seems that it is growing without particular plan. Database sources are just dump from someone's (maybe your leader's) working DB and they really need normalization. It would be nice to make a diagram, that represents your database. Something like the one that i attached to this letter (i made it in Graphviz).

I know that some people are looking into the DB. I don't know what their plans are, so I can't really comment on them.

There is also no unified api for working with web forms. And it seems that it would be hard to extend your system :( I think you should look at something like Mason.

I agree, some kind of templating, and an overall shift to a separation of logic and presentation makes sense

Or, if you plan to shift to ruby -- mod_ruby+eRuby.

I think I'm the only rubyist working on koha, so I doubt a shift to ruby is in the works.

My expirience says that php will not help here. It's too messy for such a big project.

agreed

Unfortunately i can't say more by now. Too much work :( I asked my teammates to look at Koha. Later i'll send their opinions to you.

Please inlcude the koha-devel list, I'm afraid I'd step on information when I tried to pass it along and I'm sure the other folks working on koha would appreciate seeing them.

Also i'd like to speak with the guy/gal who wrote Koha's databases.

I'm not sure who it is, but he/she should be here on the devel list.

-pate