Flexomatic (Was: Re: ruby as slow scripting language vs java?)

[Dmitry Borodaenko]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 08:37:59AM +0000, vern wrote:
> after presenting samizdat at whatthehack i got speaking to Marc ..the
> guy who wrote Indyvoter/flexomatic http://www.flexomatic.net/ which is
> an open source social networking software...it seems this uses redland
> as its rdf store.
> We were sort of thinking about trying to merge the two applications.
> If you think this is a good idea maybe we can add it to the
> design-goals and start to flesh out a working plan tabout how we can
> implement this

It definitely is a good idea, there is a lot of ideas and goals shared
between Samizdat and Flexomatic. I will give it a closer look. At the
moment, I see one area of work, and one problem.

The problem is different programming languages: Flexomatic uses Perl
while Samizdat uses Ruby. I've switched to Ruby from Perl and I don't
want to come back, so the question is what Marc thinks about switching
Flexomatic over to Ruby. After I take a look at its source code we'll
see how difficult that can be. SLOC count isn't encouraging, it's
approaching 49000, for Perl app it's _huge_ :(

But it's only a problem if we decide to completely merge the two
codebases, which might be unnecessary. It's interesting to try and draw
a line between functionalities of both applications and see how they can
interoperate, taking advantage of native RDF support in each.

The area of work is to move Samizdat closer to RDF standards compliance,
including support for a generic Ruby/RDF API (which doesn't exist yet),
support for different RDF query languages and different RDF backends
(including Redland). As you can see, most of it is already there in the
Samizdat long-term roadmap, and it's there exactly for reasons like
this: for interoperation with other RDF-capable applications.

-- 
Dmitry Borodaenko