Why a Rewrite?

Rewriting a large, working application is not something to be undertaken lightly. It is a lot of work & the payback at this stage isn't clear.

It is being done to address some real problems with the the current Sahana codebase:

• Sahana is currently based on design principles which have since become sub-optimal due to the emergence of new Rapid Application Development frameworks & highly-interactive Web 2.0 UIs.

• The current codebase has grown organically since it was originally designed - this has meant that standards have broken down & the code is becoming harder to maintain & add new functionality to.

• It is currently hard to access data from modules via consistent methods...this is required for serious integration e.g. in GIS & Messaging.

• PHP is not a good language for building large, maintainable applications: ​http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html
  • especially when using it to write out complex Javascript (the syntaxes are always tripping you up)
  • doesn't enforce Object Orientation
  • poor separation of Presentation & Code

• Whilst there is a fairly coherent framework, it isn't adhered to consistently - different developers have done very different things in different modules
• The Javascript components especially are very varied with lots of manual AJAX & the use of several different libraries
  • using a modern library means no issues with browser incompatibilities
  • consistency means less headers for clients to download

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