Lists – So Close, Yet So Far

By Sol in Blog

Last night I reached a point where basically had all the core functionality I wanted for Lists.  I uploaded it to the live server, and it worked equally well on my PC and my mobile phone. Awesome.

When I started working on it today, I felt that it still wasn’t quite as “dynamic” as I would like. I felt that I was doing too much configuration, and more of the inner workings should be automatic for me to really call this app “intelligent”.

The goal is to make a system where relationships are automatically determined and content is displayed based on these relationships. I’m at the point in development where I’m starting to work on the layout and structuring of the content. Things feel quite a bit less flexible.  I have no single-use functions (such as a function to display lists and another to display items in the current list), but rather all content display is handled by intelligent functions and variable values.

So now, I’m about to rewrite a large part of the code to make things even more automatic. I’d like to get started on this as soon as possible, but I’m still working out some of the details:

  • Just how object-oriented should it be?
  • Should configuration (parent/child relationships, etc.) be set in the objects or based on the DB structure (or both)?
  • What’s the most optimized way to fetch all the content while still retaining as much flexibility as possible?

Trust me, there’s more. I’m stopping for the evening in the hopes that some time away from the questions will help me to better find the answers.