AxKit/App/TABOO version 0.099
=============================

This release has not been signed with my GPG key. This is due to that
I had to move development to another system where my secret key is
unavailable. 

INTRODUCTION

AxKit::App::TABOO is a object oriented approach to creating a
publishing system on the top of AxKit, the XML Application Server. 
The two O's thus stands for Object Oriented, AB for AxKit-Based. 
I don't know what the T stands for yet, suggestions are welcome! 

It is a fundamental design choice with TABOO that all data is to be
abstracted to objects. I noticed while looking at other people's code,
that though it was a lot of interesting code, it would be rather hard
to integrate all the interesting parts into a coherent whole.
Furthermore, everybody has their own way of storing data, and
scattered files or different databases didn't seem right to me.

With TABOO, everything that interacts with AxKit just interacts with
the Data objects. That means, if you don't want to store things in the
PostgreSQL database my Data objects use, you could always subclass it,
rewrite the classes or whatever. You would mostly just have to rewrite
the load method. It is also the Data object's job to create XML of its
own data.

The intention is to write Data objects for every kind of thing you
might want to do. From the start, there will be Slashdot-type stories
of varying length, with comments. These are ever-changing in the sense
that people can come in an add comments at any time. The other thing
we start out with is more static and longer articles.

It is the intention, however, that TABOO should be a framework where
one can add a Wiki, a webshop (which is a work now in progress, some
code was in earlier distros but has been removed now), etc. The
AxKit::App::TABOO::User class will then be reused and probably
subclassed with e.g. a Customer class (now being done), but the
datasource will be the same.

TABOO makes extensive use of Providers. That is mostly because I like
the abstraction and direct control of URIs that Providers provide. It
makes it easy to create a framework where URIs are sensible and should
be easy to maintain for foreseeable future. Also, there is no markup
in the code, that's also rather important to make it maintainable.

For the stuff that goes into the database, OTOH, XSP is used, and
several taglibs are used.

J. Shirley has now provided some more cascading stylesheets. He has
focused on the front page, so it works mostly for that, but should
give a general idea. This will see more work soon.

This is a early release, an alpha in that it does some useful
things. It is nearly a useable framework for posting news-stories. It
consists mainly of News and NewsList providers that constructs
objects, instruct them to load their data based on the URI, get them
to write their own XML, and pass this to some XSLT stylesheets, which
makes some presentable XHTML. There are also several XSP taglibs, and
quite a lot of XSP pages and XSL Transformations are now included in
the distribution. There is also some user-management code, including
authentication and authorization, to allow adding new users and
editing the information of existing users. 

Plural objects is a conceptual step up which has recently been
introduced to allow manipulation of more than one Data object. 

TABOO can now also list News stories with the NewsList Provider, and
there is a rudimentary front page, which is an aggregate of a
newslist. The "comments" code has been rewritten and stylesheets has
been begun, but needs more work, and posting comments is now
supported, but it needs some polishing.

TABOO can run on different virtual hosts and operate on different
databases. 

It can also take user-entered text that has been marked up with some
simple syntax like Textile http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ and
convert that to HTML.

I'm following the mantra "release early", and have made everything
I've done available from the start? From 0.09, it has evolved into
something I can put on a website and have random people come by and
use, and soon, I'll call it a beta of some sort... I'll be thrilled if
other hackers are willing to poke at TABOO allready at this point!

INSTALLATION

To install this module use CPAN or CPANPLUS tools or type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

There are various things that should be done to the get the rest
running, such as copying over the htdocs and creating the database,
see inline docs for details.

DEPENDENCIES

You will need at least Perl 5.7.3 to use TABOO. This is due to
Unicode-issues that is not well supported in earlier releases.

This module requires these other modules and libraries:
- AxKit, of course!
- DBI
- DBD::Pg. You need at least 1.32. Earlier versions has problems with 
  SQL3 Arrays, but it may be possible to get away with it.  
- Encode
- Time::Piece
- Class::Data::Inheritable
- AxKit::XSP::QueryParam
- AxKit::XSP::BasicSession, you must have 0.21 or later.
- Formatter::HTML::Textile for formatting.
- Crypt::GeneratePassword for generating passwords to send to users.
- AxKit::XSP::Sendmail to send e-mail to new users.
- Apache::AxKit::Plugin::AddXSLParams::Request for virtual hosts, but
  it is easy to remove this dependency if one wishes.
- Data::Dumper lists out debugging information, but can be removed. 
- AxKit will bring along XML::LibXML, and while you could use any
  LibXSLT module supported by AxKit, I recommend XML::LibXSLT, and to
  ease installation, I made it a prerequisite.
- Apache::AxKit::Plugin::Param::Expr is needed only to use different
  languages, but I made that a prerequisite too for now.

You will also need some XML libraries, for example libxml2 and
libxslt. You will probably have gotten these along with AxKit. TABOO
should be able to use any AxKit uses, with the exception that it makes
use of some self-defined EXSLT, so you'll need a library that supports
that.

Additionally, you may experience that the installation hangs on
wanting DB_File. I believe this is a bug in some other package, but I
haven't nailed it down yet. Just install DB_File and you'll be fine.

SUPPORT

There is a list taboo-dev@kjernsmo.net you can subscribe to at 
http://lists.kjernsmo.net/mailman/listinfo/taboo-dev

Beware that TABOO is in development, so it is not yet software
that you just install and use. 

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (c) 2003-2004 Kjetil Kjernsmo. This program is free
software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
terms as Perl itself.
