[Ur] A direction for Ur/Web

Sat Mar 26 14:14:52 EDT 2011

Excerpts from Adam Chlipala's message of Sat Mar 26 18:56:48 +0100 2011:
> I don't understand which hypothetical design structure of an Ur/Web 
> library you are considering here.  What do you want to do and what do 
> you think would go wrong?

If you use PHP, Ruby, Plone, any dynamic CMS you have a directory called
/templates/main.template.

If you look into it you find 

<html>{ var here }</html>

like syntax.

So this is very very easy for anybody to customize. You don't even have
to know the language the CMS was written in.

Urweb can't do this easily - because everything is "compile time".

Now of course you could rewrite the urweb compiler using ur processing
templates at runtime .. That's what I had in mind. "in mind" does not
mean I want to code it.
It was an attepmt to find out what Gergely had in mind exactly by
providing some ideas because his description about "configurability" was
not accurate when thinking about what can commonly be done using PHP CMS
systems.  If you let your customers edit the templates you also have to
refuse all kind of guarantees - but that's another story :)

> I'm sure many people use WordPress without being prepared to write any 
> PHP code from scratch.  To me, it doesn't seem crazy that a similar 
> situation could be created for an Ur/Web library, especially when 
> equipped with a GUI for configuration.

Well - all PHP tools which are used by mainstream have this setup:

  1) upload to www directory
  2) run in browser, configure database access, provide admin password, ..
  3) remove /setup direcotry or file

Now setting up the admin password can be done trivially - but not
setting up database connection.

You're right that urweb could go another way: offer a website which
precompiles a binary after database access data has been entered.
Then the binary can be uploaded .. (this means they have to trust your
site doing the compilation ...)

Of course this all can be done - but on job market places you commonly
see requests like
- got code from page xy
- now make these adjustments: ... (change logo ,add flash ,integrate ...)

And this kind of job is easy using PHP (at least those people buying the
codes may have the impression. However I can't imagine how this
customization takes place without starting a business around urweb
offering exactly that: customizations.

Marc Weber