[Owncloud] modularization

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi everybody,

it´s importants that we structure ownCloud properly so that the code is still maintainable in a few years and that new developers understand what we do and can contribute.

The app concept is very important to make it easy for developers to extend ownCloud without the need to understand every part of ownCloud. My goal is that every ownCloud user can install, update and delete every app independently from the used ownCloud core. Every app developer should be able to release a new app at every point in time and also update it independently from the core. The apps should run on different core versions if possible.

It´s of course still a long way till we reach that goal but I think we should start now. 


I propose to do two things now.

- public api
Currently all the apps access all the internal classes and variables of owncloud directly. This means that it´s difficult to develop an app that runs on different core versions and the code will get messy over time. I think we should define a "public api" that wraps all the internals, is perfectly documented and stable over different core versions. We can add new classes, functions and optional function parameters over time but we don´t want to break existing apps. This public api is the only allowed way to access core features.


- git modularization
I suggest to split up ownCloud into a "third party" repository where all the external libraries are, "owcloud" where the core lives and "apps" where all the apps are. The apps should be as isolated from the core as possible so that we can release them independently in the future. We discussed this already last year.
An independent "third party" repo is also important if we want to use external third party libraries with incompatible licenses like currently PEAR.

I will restructure the repos and start to work on the public api wrapper on wednesday if no one objects. :-)


So what do you think?


Cheers
Frank