Jonathan's Blog

Rainbow Core API Thoghts

Lately we have been doing a lot of talking about what can be done with the core, what is being done, and what will happen.

One of the more interesting discussions for me going on right now, is the talk of api's for rainbow.

• Application API - Thing of it as framework or System
  • Allot of core business logic
  • Services that content, modules, controls all need to use
  • Permission API
    • Manage the permissions for everything separate from itself, ill get into this later.
  • Pages API
    • Site Map
    • Google Site Map Generator
    • Page Business Logic
    • Content API
    • Membership & Profile API

      Namespaces then would look something like

    • Rainbow
    • Rainbow.Application
    • Rainbow.Site
    • Rainbow.Pages
    • Rainbow.Security
    • Rainbow.Security.Permissions
    • Rainbow.Users
    • Rainbow.Content
    • Rainbow.Web
    • Rainbow.Web.UI
    • etc......

    The logic then being that allot of the code gets abstracted, becoming more scalable, maintainable and easy for devs to implement and use.

    So if you where to create a new module, or control, or web part, or whatever you want to call it... you could do nifty things like this.

       1:  Rainbow.Content.Module.Install();

       2:  Rainbow.Content.InsertItem();

       3:  Rainbow.Content[itemID] = your item;

       4:  Rainbow.Content.ContentItem.ChildItems[3].FullText = FCKEditor.Text;

       5:  DateTime dateCreated = ContentItem.ChildItems[3].DatePublished;

    Of course, the Object ContentItem would make use of the permission api.

    So the content Item would be smart and work in conjunction with the current requests user... so you might end up with something like

       1:              User curUser = rainbowpage.currentuser;

       2:              if(curUser.HasUpdate(contentItemId))

       3:              {

       4:                  ContentItem _item = new ContentItem(contentItemId);

       5:                  _item.FullText = "";

       6:                  _item.Author = "";

       7:                  _item.LastUpdated = DateTime.Now; // should be inside the API

       8:                  business logic :-)

       9:                  _item.Save();

      10:              }

    Anyway, we have some time till we actually start seeing stuff like this, however, it's nice to think about and start considering the design of such APIs, also I was bored and felt like adding ann entry into my blog.

    - Jonathan F. Minond