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pea (spelled in lower-case for it’s trendiness, but not really) is a project that I started, renamed several times, rewrote several times, and then decided to ignore for about a year. Only when I went to Art&&Code did I recognize where the value of the project is. Based on that, I feel I have earned the right to describe it without providing any code to the public yet. And despite that the value is phony and the project will likely be “completed” (abandoned) when I am able to find a project that does what I am trying to better from which I can heavily “borrow” (steal).
So, ahem, a brief introduction to pea:
I thought I should put that in there in nice, big letters.
An essay which I am in the progress of writing. Very short, very easy to understand.
There are five. Rules are absurd, but they help me to maintain my sanity and direction at this point. So here they are. These were devised about 2 years ago, and maybe they ought to be changed. I will accept feedback of all sorts, and roundly criticize it all.
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SMALLABILITY
- pea is, has been, and must remain small. Really, really, tiny. As small as possible while retaining it’s usability. This is some of the reason it is called pea, and all of the reason it is spelled in lower-case, but not really. You know, there’s that and the trendiness.
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LAMP STACKABILITY
- On github, this is a really bad idea. I get it. But it’s one of the rules, and let me explain why: So, webhosting. pea lives on a server, and especially on $3/year servers that offer no premium services or support or niceties. pea is just happier in these places. And there are simply not many super-cheap shared-hosting decrepit servers that don’t support that LAMP stack. So I figured, you know, peas gotta’ eat and all.
- Also, as long as I am being honest here, pea used to be called phPea, and I even bought phpeapods.com at one point, but I am not even sure which of my thousand servers that points to now. But I decided to lose the ph (after much agonizing) because you are decidedly not programming in php with pea (really, okay but kind of) and also because it’s a little strange to name something after the language you are writing it in. Like if there was something called RubySuperDuperListOrganizerInRuby or something.
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SIMPLIBILITY
- Alright, down to the grit of it. I have goals. The grand kind. Because until this point I was designing a web framework or maybe even a CMS. Absurd. See, these guys are operating with a huge disadvantage to pea. The audience that they are targeting is overwhelmingly those who are capable of using their products. Like, at least 90%. And let’s compare that to the number of people who can’t. Big difference, right?
- pea is designed for non-programmers. Which is of course silly, because if you have sent an email then you are a programmer, but I like to say non-programmer because it makes the helpless souls that I throw at this thing during what I like to call, “testing,” far more cooperative.
- This pretty much translates into a nice clean GUI with simple textual syntax. No code-writing necessary.
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TWEAKABILITY
- This one is almost a real word. Drat.
- Everything you do in pea gets turned into real, object oriented, totally legit and not like the other stuff you always hear about PHP. Plus it’s built with my sqloop and peapods libraries, so it’s totally easy to play with if you want to dig down a little bit. Not even a lot. Probably there will be an interface in that webgui that lets you look at it (I hadn’t thought of this possibility until now, but now I am thinking about the security implications and I’m starting to get really scared).
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EXTENDABILITY
- This one actually is a real word. I’ve lost my touch.
- pea was not initially, but I quickly decided must me, modular in nature. Because the real reason for making pea is that I don’t have those good ideas that other people do, and I want to give them the tools to make it a reality. So let’s do the same for this utility.