Making the move...

[Dan Shafer]

I agree. Useful discussion for things I'm thinking hard about these days as
I move away from Ruby on Rails and look for Rev-centric approaches to the
software projects I want to build.



On 3/28/06, Sivakatirswami <katir at hindu.org> wrote:

I mean if  the SSI <! include exec some rev.cgi.> returns data to the
HTML page instead of an HTML chunk, then you have the separation
between "views" and "data"  you describe, n'est pas? No?

In the simplistic case, this is probably true. Where it breaks down is where
we are retrieving data from a database (or for that matter from some other
form of persistent storage) on the server and we need to create tables of
dynamic data in the web page, for example. This requires the use of an
iterator that encloses HTML formatting something like this:

<% order_line.line_items.each do |li| %>
  <div class="olitem">
    <span class="olitemqty"><%= li.quantity %></span>
    <span class="olitemtitle"><%= li.product.title %></span>
  </div>
<% end %>

The coder (developer) builds this construct and the HTML designer creates
the definitions for the classes that define how s/he wants that kind of data
displayed. But it's the iterator (the each do operation) that makes this
possible. To make this happen with an SSI would, I think, be much more
complicated if in fact it could be implemented at all.

I think what I'm coming to is that an MVC framework, properly implemented,
creates as nearly as possible a complete severance between content and
presentation. CSS is one of the ways this is made even more efficient, but
it is really the MVC architecture that provides the necessary support.



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Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
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