Topic for the day: porting “Userland” technologies to the IIS/ASP/COM environment. Case in point: prefs.root. Prefs.root allows you to use a fairly easy xml structure to define a form-based interface for gathering information from website users. From the name, you can guess that this technology was originally designed for allowing users to set site preferences on Userland websites. However, the structure could easily be used to create step-by-step wizards, for guiding users through a process as well.
The nice thing about xml is that it doesn’t care what environment you’re in. So we’ve been implementing an ASP/JScript engine which can read the xml and create an interface.
The hard thing is yet to come. Because of Frontier’s unique ODB (Object Database), it’s easy to specify in your xml file where you want the information you’re collecting to be stored. Prefs.root takes care of creating storage on the fly.
Accomplishing that task in a SQL-based environment is much more difficult. That’s the task ahead…
Jim Roepcke kindly directs our attention to a post on Internet Alchemy. It’s got links to some very interesting articles on storing hierarchies in RDBMSes; I’m going to check these out more later. I don’t necessarily see the problem as one of hierarchies, but of creating new tables/relationships on the fly.
