Now that Daryl Pierce has written rubygem-cobbler* for making Cobbler's
XMLRPC API even easier to use for webapps, and I have already mentioned
WebUI improvements are going to be a major focus of the next release, I
am pondering /potentially/ making a future iteration of Cobbler Web use
Rails. This seems easier to me in many ways that adding some new
capabilities into the existing web app.
The downside to this is there is no Rails in EL 4, but it is there in EL
5 (Rails 2.0.2 is in EPEL 5). This would mean if you wanted Cobbler
Web, you'd have to install the Web app on a EL 5 or later server, but
cobbler could stay on an EL 4 server. This would also mean you would
have the option of installing Cobbler on a seperate box from
cobbler-web, which is now /not/ supported easily by the RPM.
For those concerned about setup, this would /not/ require a database as
it would be using Cobbler for the model. (* = Daryl should be sending
an email about this shortly, and we're going to put some Wiki examples
up). Also this would move CobblerWeb to a seperately installable
package, such as cobbler-web, reducing Cobbler dependencies for those
that do not need the web app -- which seems to be goodness.
Just thinking about it at this point, comments welcome.
Django/TurboGears are also valid choices, but I figured since we already
have the XMLRPC wrapper module we should use it.
If we do this, the existing CobblerWeb code would continue to be
included for a couple of releases as a deprecated feature before we
would remove it.
--Michael