August 17, 2000

Visiting Niagara, SPOPS triggers

Good and bad news of late.

First, this past weekend we went camping with Barb's aunt, uncle, mom and my sister around Erie, Pa. On the way there, we realized that Niagara Falls was only (in theory) about an hour away, so we figured what the heck.

Took a little longer than that, and it was crowded as all get out, but pretty amazing. I'd like to go when the weather isn't so great (colder, which will probably happen in about three weeks or so...), there are fewer people and it's easier to get lost in the sound and fury without some screaming baby or whatnot. Fun trip overall, though.

Another good thing: got through a nice little idea barrier last night and implemented some nifty stuff in SPOPS. Kindasorta like triggers in a DBMS, we can make it really easy to apply all sorts of disparate metadata layers on the data objects. For instance, restricting certain data objects to certain groups; allowing users/groups to 'publish' the data object and other users/groups to 'subscribe' to all objects or even those that meet certain criteria. The cool thing is that you can have any number of 'rules' (term for now) applied to two phases of an action -- for instance, when you call 'save', you can create a rule for before the object is saved, and after the object is saved. Ditto with 'fetch' and 'remove'. Cascading deletes are now really simple, as is lots of other interesting stuff.

The only thing I hate about getting over a hump like this is that I look back at the hurdles I couldn't previously jump over (or go around) and think "Duh!" and get down on myself for not seeing it earlier. But I suppose that's inevitable (and almost always not prolonged).

Bad news: encountering unexpected resistance in opensourcing OpenInteract and SPOPS. Enormous downer. It's not done yet, and I think with a good argument we will be able to release SPOPS and the crucial parts of OpenInteract. I'm working on that now. I'm proud of all the work that's gone into this, and I want to be able to share it and see people doing things I never dreamed with it.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

Next: How do people use Win9x?
Previous: Dad's wedding, more photos