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(a)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