paulbhartzog's blog

Planning on reading this.
I like the tone of the author,
and I think he groks change in a useful way because he's a linguist.

-p

For nearly 50 years, Educational Technology Publications has been a choice publisher of those doing the finest, most up-to-date thinking in the education field. On its website the company reports having been at the forefront of every important new trend in the development of the field throughout the past five decades.

Now they have jumped to the forefront of the open content trend in publishing. Publisher Lawrence Lipsitz writes to me in an email:

. . . we are now placing all pages of all of our more than 300 books published since 1969, including even the most recently published books, both in-print and out-of-print books, with the GoogleBooks program, available for full-text search and reading. Every page of every book. Close to 200 are “live” now, with Google processing the remainder daily. In the first ten days, there were about 25,000 page views (with only some of the books available for viewing at the time). This is all open and free.

Flows Mercurial Work-Process - Flows

a page on the Flows wiki:

http://flows.panarchy.com/index.php?title=Flows_Mercurial_Work-Process

Today I successfully generated some documentation directly from commented Flows code in both php and python, and I also found that Doxygen ought to work with Ruby (we'll see). In a Flows-like way, Doxygen generates the documentation in XML, HTML, RTF, etc.

I learned enough about the process though to realize that it might be smarter to write a Flows component that generates the documentation you need when you are looking at it in the browser, instead of pre-generating static files of documentation.

Will have to contemplate....

Basically:

1. Pick a programming language: python, php, etc.
2. Download the template for components in that language, or in another language if your choice is not available.

http://flows.panarchy.com/sandbox/templates/

Mercurial Repository:
http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/

3. Add in the desired functionality
4. Make your component accessible via HTTP

This may mean some server/hosting setup and configuration on your end.

that's it. srsly.

Q: But why is it so simple?

A: Remember, Flows does not dictate what your internal code looks like. Flows is an interaction specification, not a programming specification. As long as your code responds to HTTP requests and is willing to communicate with other Flows components, then Flows itself is ambivalent about what is inside your code.

now get to it.