[MUD-Dev] Must infrastructure dictate content? (was: Forks or Frameworks)

[Kwon Ekstrom]

Gavin Doughtie wrote:

>> From the nature of the traffic in response to my original "Forks or
>> Frameworks" post, it seems like many of you do indeed see the
>> mechanics of a MUD codebase as inseperable from its content.
 
> Perhaps this is a gross oversimplification, but I see thousands of
> web sites, all massively different, all based on HTML and the Apache
> web server software. All of the sites benefit from a shared
> infrastructure and none are accused of unoriginality (because of
> that, anyway).

You can probably separate the mechanics of the codebase from the
content, but I don't think it would be easy, and probably not
worthwhile

You used the web as an example, but I think that equates to a display
mechanism.  HTML is the ANSI of the web.  Most major web sites use CGI
or other Serverside parsing to generate the content.  For complex
sites, the content is probably generated using proprietary software
that just outputs what you see.

Several muds have tried to limit the need to edit the actual "hard
code" which resulted in various scripting systems or "softcode".  But
unless you have a system that's very similar to a programming language
(can define variable and manipulate them directly) you're not going to
get complete separate content from mechanics.

Another, more promising possibility would be to have a codebase that
uses object orienting, and makes heavy use of events.  You could then
easily write a plugin system and add capabilities without needing to
code them.  But someone would still have to code them, it just makes
snippeting etc.

Just a few thoughts._______________________________________________
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