Dominic wrote:
We're having a hackfest some time in the new year, though, and I will try and make this a priority, as a single point of entry/search for OpenGuides is indeed quite important.
On Mon 10 Dec 2007, Adam Boardman via Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
Excellent :) It is quite a change from the distributed approach you've taken so far.
I don't think we have to abandon the distributed approach in order to do what Adam wants. How about, we have an API where any Open Guide will be able to answer the following questions:
1. What's the bounding box for all your pages? 2. Give me details of all your pages within a chosen bounding box.
Then we have a central service which asks each guide question 1 every so often and caches the result. When someone asks this central service to find all OpenGuides pages within a given bounding box, it uses this cached result to figure out which guides it needs to contact and ask question 2 of.
Does that fit in with what Adam wants his app to do?
The central service will of course need to have a list of the active guides, but I don't see this as a great hardship.
RDF sounds fine (XML format), what about the return path, say you've got WhereAmI (my app) on your phone, you've identified your location with GPS or GSM CellID, downloaded the map around you, listed the openguides locations, picked your pub for lunch, routed to it, had a meal, but found an error in the guide, what is the desired return path?
Sounds like something similar to RGL's "add a comment" link would work for this. This is how I usually update RGL when I'm out and about - my phone has Opera on it, and so I could in theory use the full edit form, but it's a lot simpler just to add a comment and then someone who's at an actual computer can do any tidying necessary.
I presume that with your distributed architecture you have independant user accounts on each site, what about supporting openid? or something else? to let remote users authenticate their changes.
If we do ever add authentication then OpenID would be the way to go.
Kake