[Swift-devel] First tests with swift faster

[Lorenzo Pesce]

On Feb 20, 2013, at 10:44 PM, Michael Wilde wrote:

>>> I want to get to the point where most users never type XML to use
>>> Swift, and the way to that is gensites, which should be coorinated
>>> with this change.
>> 
>> This is an opportunity to deal with the issue. Perhaps a better
>> configuration format might be the better choice.
> 
> Should we consider a simpler name/value format and eliminate XML here? A site could pretty much be defined by a single level set of name=value pairs.

I give you my 2 cents as a "heavy" user. I like XML and I like it to be there. I never write one line of it because I generate the XML files using scripts.
I plan to make these scripts available to the users on Beagle and all users if you find that it could help.
But, I still think that XML is good.

Sometimes I find names confusing (typically the *time* kinds), but again I rarely have to deal with them directly nor do my users.

> Basically make the input to gensites the actual format instead of requiring another layer?

I will have to look this one up to understand it better.

> I should also mention that what goes on *inside* the Java code is similarly complex.  Understanding how attributes go from sites.xml and swift.properties through the various config layers, especially with Coasters involved, has been a barrier to many developers, debugging efforts, and improvements.  Im not sure the two are that closely related, but while we're working in the neighborhood, might want to consider some improvement (and documentation) as well.  I think Justin took a first crack at documenting the config conventions, but Im not sure where that went.