[Koha-devel] Restructuring C4

[Chris Cormack]

On 31 March 2011 16:51, Galen Charlton <gmcharlt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> 2011/3/30 Ian Walls <ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com>:
>> All this indicate to me that we REALLY need to start thinking about imposing
>> some kind of structure on C4.  I'm thinking something with two-levels:
>>
>> Level 1 :  Calls to the database, other direct interaction with stored data
>> Level 2:   Calls to Level 1 functions to manipulate data
>
> Thanks for doing the analysis.  Regarding the overall project of
> restructuring C4, I suggest a slightly different way of looking at it:
> *not* restructuring C4 as such, but using it as a springboard for its
> successor.
>
> In other words, we'd still be creating a better structure, just in a
> different namespace.  Let's pick a name randomly for that namespace.
> I reach into my hat and pull out ... "Koha".  Fancy that. :)
>
> The Koha namespace would be for Perl modules that meet the following
> mandatory conditions:
>
> - usable by mod_perl (or its equivalent)
> - export the minimum number of routines necessary
> - follow stricture, warnings, documentation, and test case standards
> - separating data access methods from business logic
>
> and preferably the following optional conditions:
>
> - purely OO
>
> Obviously, the conditions and whether they would be mandatory or
> optional is a topic for discussion.
>
> Modules in C4 could use (and would be encouraged to use) routines in
> the Koha namespace.  Modules in Koha could not in general use C4
> modules; any C4 module that was safe to be depended on by a Koha
> module would be a candidate for being renamed to Koha.
>
> The advantage of carving out a new namespace is that it doesn't
> require that we refactor the entirety of C4 to support persistance or
> to untangle the dependency tree.  Instead, the only C4 code we would
> have to reimplement for the Koha namespace right away would be
> authentication, basic session management, and basic output.  That,
> along with data access using DBIx::Class, would allow us to start
> using mod_perl right away for specific functions.  One example of
> something that would then be easy to transform to a service running
> under mod_perl would be the unapi and OAI-PMH services.  As
> functionality gets detangled from C4 and moved into Koha, we can
> increase the number of services running under mod_perl while still
> keeping the CGI scripts that still depend on C4.
>
+1 From me

I think this is the way to go.

Chris