Macto
Macto
Macto, Authorization decisions
Authorization is one of the few ubiquitous requirements, you are going to have to handle them in pretty much every system that you are going to build. The users are the staff, and the securables are the inmates. The problem is that we have fairly different authorization requirements for different parts of the system. For example, any authenticated user can lookup pretty much any inmate’s data (except for medical records, of course), but changing release date is something that only Legal can do. Only the staff on the enclosure that the inmate is...
Macto, defining Centralized Service, Distributed Service and Localized Component
I lately come into the conclusion that I need a few new terms to describe a few common ways to talk about the way that I structure different components in my applications. Those are Centralized Service, Distributed Service and Localized Component. Mostly, I use them as a way to express the distribution semantics of the item in question. As you can probably guess, I am using the term service to refer to something that we make remote calls to, while I am using the term component to refer to something that is running locally. Centralized Service is...
Macto, a module features spec sheet for authentication
I am going to talk about a few ways of trying to organize a project, mostly as a way to lay out the high level requirements for a feature or a module. I consider filling in one of those to be the act of actually sitting down and thinking about the concrete design of the system. It is not final design, and it is not set in stone, but in general it forces me to think about things in a structured way. It is not a very hard to do, so let us try to do this...
Macto, or How To Build a Prison
The sample application that I am going to build is going to be a prison management application. I am going to take this post as a chance to talk about it a bit, discuss the domain and then I’ll talk about the overall architecture in more details. The domain of a prison is actually fairly simple, you have an inmate, and the sole requirement is that you would keep him (it tend to be overwhelmingly him, rather than her) in lawful custody. The term lawful custody has a lot of implications, which are, in more...
More on Macto
Looking at the responses that I got, I think that there is some basic misunderstanding about the goal of the sample. Some people seems to want this to be a usable product, some even went ahead and specified some… interesting requirements. Unlike Storefront, I don’t intend to create something that would be a useful component to take and use, for the simple reason that I don’t think that it would allow to show anything really interesting. Any generic component or system has to either make too much assumptions (constrained) or not enough (open ended). I don’t care to...
Macto: An end to end sample
It looks like what people would really like to see is an end to end sample of all the things that I have been talking about lately. The problem with doing that is the scope that we are talking about here, it is pretty big, and there are some interconnected parts that would be hard to look at in isolation. To make things a little bit more interesting, building a “best practice” application is dependent on far too many variables. Given all of that, I decided that I might as well copy a good idea and try...