Archives for July 2010

Mailing list?

I think we’d all be delighted with a mailing list to discuss design, development and deployment issues. The question is: who’d like to set one up?  (Not me, thanks.  I have enough on my plate.) Update: Tennessee has set up the mailing list on Google Groups – the link is in the right-hand column.

KISS and Plexus

One of the most important design principles of Plexus is simplicity.  The architecture is simple.  The functionality is simple.  The explanation is simple.  Anything that complicates any of the design, architecture or functionality should almost always get pushed off to another functional unit (generally, the front-end). Every technical or implementation question that’s come up so [...]

Discovery and pCard format

One problem Tony mentioned – and again, which came up in the BOF – is the issue of ‘discovery’.  How do you find someone else?  Really what this means is how do you find someone else’s pCard? Provided that someone places their pCard into a publicly crawlable location on a web server – so that [...]

Keeping pCards Current

I had the great opportunity to spend the day with Tony Parisi yesterday, and we talked through a number of questions about Plexus that he’s been mulling over.  The next few blog posts will detail some of those thoughts. First – and this is a question that came up in the BOF – how do [...]

Wikis!

A wiki is probably the best place to capture knowledge nutted out in the various working groups.  There is no shortage of options, and we have two to pick from: plexus.wikispaces.com – A free, hosted wiki which has some light advertising as its price of admission. plexusdev.wikia.com – A hosted wiki, built atop MediaWiki, which [...]

Working Groups

There are several overall areas of development which need to be pursued simultaneously in Plexus development. These include (but are not limited to): Front-end API: How does Plexus talk to whatever front-end applications want to interact with it.  This will include the development of a protocol and security procedures for the client / Plexus interaction. [...]

The Road Ahead

At the present moment, Plexus is just a toy, a demonstration of what Plexus might be able to do – someday. We need to put our heads together and had a good think about how to move from where we are – with an architecture and a lot of ideas – to where we need [...]