mind can has mountains

I’ve been thinking for a while that what I really want to do with Alexandria is experiment wildly. I want to see what kind of database might work best. I’d like to check out the possibility of using RDF-triples to describe arbitrary properties of books. I want to redesign the core domain from the ground up to that the program supports a deep domain model. And to do that, I think I need to depart from ordinary Alexandria development for a while.

I won’t be giving up on maintenance of the main Alexandria program. It’s a useful program in its current state, and it has a few bugs which are preventing it being properly stable for its users. They need to be sorted out, certainly. But the addition of new features into the pre-existing codebase is just too… messy. Especially without a plan.

So, I’ve decided to create a new little side project for myself and hack on that instead. Apart from anything else, it should help lift my current development funk surrounding Alexandria. If it goes badly, I can at least learn some things from the experience and avoid them when I return to adding features to Alexandria directly. If it goes really well, it may replace the entire Alexandria codebase (this is quite unlikely). In any case, it’ll be called Palatina, after Bibliotheca Palatina. To begin with, I’ll be writing short articles here about how the domain might be worked out. Then, I might make a few diagrams, write a few code fragments… We’ll see how it goes. Eventually, a wiki and a source repository might be necessary.

If anyone wants to comment constructively on my work with Palatina, drop me a line and I’ll create an account for you on this journal - you’ll know my e-mail address from the Alexandria mailing list.