Just a short bit of what I've been playing with recently.

I still work on my CMS off and on and recently I've been experimenting with REST. In my old design each module had a function called GetContent() which would be passed an array of POST variables and an array of parameters coming from the URI. The problem with this design is that I needed to do all my form processing in some large and nasty function which basically left me unsatisfied with my entire system. I also ran into some chicken-vs.-egg problems when installing modules.

This is my new system:

I've gotten rid of the GetContent() function. Instead, during installation, modules can register handlers for specific HTTP methods on given URIs. For example, my administration module registers a handler for GET on /members/*, /modules/, PUT on /widgets/, and DELETE on /members/* (among other things). GET on /members/ will get a page listing the registered members on my site. You can be more specific and GET /members/Colin%20Jeanne/ and it will get my profile. PUT on /widgets/ will change the display order of the widgets. DELETE on /members/Colin%20Jeanne/ will delete my user account.

Each URI/HTTP method pair is associated with a callback function which handles it and is passed the rest of the URI as extra parameters. For example, GET on /members/Colin%20Jeanne/ is handled by the function that handles all GETs on /members/* and "Colin Jeanne" is the parameter of the function.

I like this system by there are some kinks to work out. Firstly, I like the use of PUT and DELETE but these seem difficult to use in HTML forms - PUT especially. I would like to have the content of a PUT message be an XML fragment but HTML forms dont really allow me to specify what is sent. I could easily set it up in &#106avascript but I'd like my site to also work for users with &#106avascript turned off.<br><br>Hmmm... I'll definitely need to experiment more during winter break.<div> </div>