yaws

[Willem Broekema]

Claes Wikstrom wrote:
 > Howdy folks,
 >
 > I've just started a little late-night-hack webserver project.
 > I've come quite some distance in just a little while and it looks
 > good.
 >
 > The reason I started was that
 > I found myself in a position where I had to write a little dynamic
 > content website and I discovered that php sucks bigtime.

Right now you seem to create a template-based file-based web server.

If you want to aim for something bigger, consider making it similar to 
Zope, an open-source web application server written in Python, 
<http://zope.org>, by adding a persistent storage for Erlang terms, maybe 
using Mnesia? Can Mnesia store hierarchical data? In that case you can set 
the server up to let server.com/folder1/folder2/term refer to the Erlang 
term located in f1/f2. The storage can support transactions, undo etc (I'm 
sure I have read Mnesia supports that).

Right now the templates do not work well together with WYSIWYG HTML 
editors. Zope has solved this by using the attributes of standard HTML tags 
instead of new <erl> tags. In a separate XML namespace, template commands 
are included.

See Zope's Template Attribute Language 
<http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/TAL%20Specification%201.4>,
which is part of the functionality of Zope Page Templates, 
<http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/FrontPage>. I think their 
solution is quite neat and elegant, better than the current <erl> syntax.


- Willem, satisfied amateur Zope user :-)