I’ve been snatching a few hours here and there to progress racoon, but progress is slow. I need the 48 hour working day people keep promising.
I’ve already got the simple “create a prototype application” step working, though it’s evolving almost daily as I add capabilities to the application itself. It’s definitely in the territory of “quick hack” at the moment, but I think it shows the way for how it would work in practice.
I’ve been experimenting with writing a Generator to give me database schemas as XML, with some success. JDBC provides some methods for getting metadata about tables, and it almost works for me. Progress on this is slow, though, so I decided to take a short cut: Ruby on Rails performs a series of queries against the database to get this information, so I cheated and copied those queries for now. I’m using them in combination with the SQL Transformer to let me try out some of the other components without being held up on the Generator step.
So last night I got the first pass of dynamic forms generated from a database schema working. It’s rough and has lots of limitations, but at least I have something tangible now. Add a row to the database table, and a new field is added to your Cocoon Form automatically.
This morning I had a couple of evil ideas for how to improve on Rails’ database configuration, which I’m trying out now. I think with Rails’ ideas and Cocoon’s power, we might just have a killer framework …
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