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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] working

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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] working
  • Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:39:17 +0100

Chad Knepp wrote:

...hasn't been as fun or easy as I expected. I'm feeling a lot of
pressure to perform in a way that is interfering with doing real work.
So far I've logged about an hour and a half and have struggled since
to get on the clock. Weird how hacking can be fun until you get paid
for it. Anyway, I've gotten a lot less done than I expected over the
weekend but I hope to hack my head into a mode that can be comfortable
and really kick something intersting out over the next week.

Don't worry. I was not expecting things to be easy.
As a guide it took about a months solid work to get the
experimental system working on ibiblio and its taken at least
two weeks to reimplement the pfaf db for our new webserver.
And much of that work was not any actual coding, just scratching my head trying to workout what the tables (objects) should be.

I'd be very inclined to set the initial goals very low
try to just concentrate on the core architecture
getting into too much detail at this stage on locales,
redoing plant uses, bioregions etc. is going distract from the main task.

This is one of the reasons I've sugested the Hello World with objects
as a starting point. The simplest example I could think of which does a proof of concept.

At this stage I'd almost be inclined just to use a simple plant object
which a bunch of text strings for a few properties. Just to get something working. Start small and build on that. Once thats done I'd probably focus on how we cope with edits. I think this is probably the hardest programming aspect.

Money wise I think head scratching time is just as valuable as actually coding. From my experience of putting together complicated OO systems the hard part is deciding what object there are, once thats done
the actual coding is fairly straitforward. I think it should be rewarded as such.

I've also a suspicision that actually coding in zope will make things a bit harder to start with.

Great input about locales. I think Lat/Long seems to be the most
important information from which most other data can be derived.
There also seems to be pretty comprehensive utils to find Lat/Long
based on geographical names. At this point I'm thinking I will use
Lat/Long and a climate summary (possibly derived) and as Rich
M. suggested build on it as needed. I'm interested in defining
bioregions as well with this, but I don't think it is a phase one
goal. Trivially a bioregion could be defined as +/- N minutes of a
degree.

Sounds cool. I'll hold my tongue at the moment to save us getting diverted, but lots of interesting ideas.

Good stuff, the first step is the hardest!

Rich
--
Plants for a Future: 7000 useful plants
Web: http://www.pfaf.org/ same as http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/
Post: 1 Lerryn View, Lerryn, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, PL22 0QJ
Tel: 01208 872 963 / 0845 458 4719
Email: webmaster@pfaf.org
PFAF electronic mailing list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pfaf







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