Breaking things up

The winner of the last blog entry was Django. Reading over it again, it seemed that my main objection to Django was that the problem structure - hierarchical data, stored in Mogile, with lots of functions that do things other than CRUDscreen operations (eg. compilation & asset management) - didn't really fit a web framework meant for CMSes. Other than that, Django would be great, and there were a bunch of 3rd-party Django apps I wanted to use.

But there's another option - I could make the structure of our project fit Django, by pulling all the other stuff relating to the game creation language or compiler out into a separate project. And I should probably do this anyway, because it leads to a more flexible, more decoupled architecture. For example, I could run command-line tools that make & publish games and yet don't need Pylons installed.

So I just spent a couple days pulling everything out into separate projects. I have one for the compiler (input: a JSON data structure representing the game, output: a Flash file), one for storing things in Mogile, and eventually one for the website itself. Former 2 are standalone Python projects installed via setuptools, the latter one is a Django project that hopefully will also have a setuptools script. The compiler passes all its existing unit tests for both Python and Actionscript already, the storage module will be tested in a bit, maybe after dinner.

I'm kinda surprised (and very glad) that it only took 2 days. When I did the same thing at my first employer and my last employer (hah, no matter where I work, I end up doing the same job), it took like a month, and in my last employer's case was never finished. Granted, there I needed cooperation from the other engineers, and they all had other things to do.