Subject: Nukumi2 Roadmap
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 18:12:15 +0200
Category: Nukumi Ruby

In the last few weeks, I have been writing some Ruby libraries that
will ultimately empower Nukumi2, my next-generation blogware.  In particular,
these, and their current state, are:

* bungee: The application container that will hold Nukumi2 (and other
  software, I hope). It will allow to use Nukumi2 using CGI or as a
  Webrick servlet, but can also do static page generation.  bungee is
  currently early beta, but the design works.

* topical: A dynamic and flexible categorization framework.  I only
  started that yesterday, but I can tell it works. :-)

* tangerine: Nukumi2 won't make use of XSLT (at least, not by
  default).  tangerine will be used to define the page templates.  It
  already works really nicely, but hasn't been used a lot yet.

* dana: Later versions of Nukumi2 will use possibly dana, a
  pre-alpha, so-far proof-of-concept object database, mainly for
  caching purposes.

These are other Ruby libraries, not written by me, that I am likely to
use:

* [needle](http://needle.rubyforge.org) is a rubyish
  dependency-injection framework.  I will almost surely want to use it
  (at least 33% of the Nukumi1 code would have been superfluous if I
  had known about dependency-injection back then...).

* [WEBrick](http://www.webrick.org): This Ruby-based webserver will be
  the preferred way to access Nukumi2, however, CGI and static pages
  will be supported too.

* [BlueCloth](http://bluecloth.rubyforge.org): BlueCloth has been
  proven to be very useful and will continue to stay the default
  markup language.  Other Clothes will stay to be easy to add, though.

Now, why do we (or I, at least) need Nukumi2 at all?

* I'm really dissatisfied with the current code base.  Every feature I
  want to add---and that should be easy---is harder than the one
  before.  I don't understand the main processing loop anymore (shame
  on me).  Besides, I hope (nah, I'm sure...) that my coding qualities
  have improved, and that refactoring won't cut it in *this* case.

* There is much more Ruby blogware around now that inspires me.  When I
  started coding Nukumi, all I knew of was an early Hobix, and various
  blosxom ports.  Now, I have looked at recent Hobix versions,
  Blogtari!, Rublog, etc. etc.  Nukumi2 won't be without reason a new
  major version.

* There are various features that I'd like to have: dynamic page
  generation (this will change a lot), better categorization
  features...

* It sounds like fun. :-)

I'll start writing a spike this week; I estimate about 2 weeks for it.
(I shouldn't estimate in my blog entries, I know.)  Then, I'll redo it
using test-driven development.  I hope to get a 0.1 out this year.

NP: Green Day---American Idiot  
(American voters, it will depend on you whether I have to play that
song again on November 2nd.)