NYCPHP Meetup

[csnyder]

On 3/28/06, inforequest <1j0lkq002 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> There has been some debate n NYPHP in the past about using "event" as a
> basic data structure for websites. For example, given an event data
> construct (what, when,where,whom,about/related to, comments about, etc)
> one could build many common MVC websites.

Some observations:

"When" is typically two values, start and end. To find the events in a
given month, you look up all the events that start and/or end within
the month, or that start before and end after the month.

But... recurring events are a difficult problem with this model. You
can insert all the instances of a recurring event for the next 5
years, and group them together so they can be changed as a group. It
is not so difficult to imagine a situation where that gets really
ugly.

Instead, you can build a cron-style system in which every event is a
recurring event (even if it only occurs once). In this case, "when" is
a set of values: minute, hour, day of month, month, year, day of week
and duration. That makes managing recurring events a snap (change one
record) but it makes lookup quite a bit more complicated.

And let us not forget timezones and daylight savings time, which, when
combined with the intricacies of rendering multi-day events on a
month-view calendar, will make grown men weep.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/29/daylight_saving_ends.html

I wonder why there aren't more products out there that get this right?

--
Chris Snyder
http://chxo.com/