About a mont ago at one of my contract jobs we had a discussion about the Prototype design pattern and mixins. The discussion took place around javascript, which is by language construct a prototyped language. For those who don't know about the Prototype design pattern let me quote from the Gang-of-Four, "Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by coping this prototype." Or, Wikipedia, "Prototype-based programming is a style of object-oriented programming in which classes are not present, and behavior reuse (known as inheritance in class-based languages) is performed via a process of cloning existing objects that serve as prototypes. This model can also be known as class-less, prototype-oriented or instance-based programming."

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Those who know me by the work I did on sanctus.org are probably wondering where the progress on the re-write I mentioned back in February. Well, today I committed a little more source code for the project and updated my own projects page to include a link to the Google Code project page. This is where I am keeping the source code for the library I have been developing. Currently, the base loader and a set of calculators are there, the calculators determine how a particular lectionary behaves, ie. Historic, Michelmas, Three Year, etc. These calculators are supposed to determine the current Sunday of the Church year based upon a PHP DateTime object.

The library is far from complete, the calculators return a number correlating to the Sunday of the year - but right now you have no way of knowing what that Sunday of the year is. My next step is to develop a Sunday object with mapping, and setup a way so that the particular Sunday object in use can be changed and thus alternative mappings become available for different calculators.

As for sanctus.org, it's revival is based upon this library's completion. So, this is progress. It's taking me so long because, as I've said before, I'm no longer a full-time student with lots of free time, and between my commitments to work and my family I have very little spare time these days. It really stinks to grow up! If you're really anxious to get sanctus.org back up you either need to be patient, or you can always consider a PayPal donation - which does help development.

Stay tuned...

I get a lot of e-mails about sanctus.org which for several years ran as an online calendar for the Historic Lectionary of the Lutheran Church. I first developed what I called the Historic Lectionary Online Project while in college. It was during a week of intensive courses after the official semester was completed during my Freshman year. When my dorm buddies and I weren't busily trying to pray the Octaves (this was before I started dating my wife) I was trying to automate the process of picking out the daily lections we used. If that wasn't geeked-out enough, I kept expanding it and eventually put it up online for everyone to use. For years it ran fine without any problems.

Back in September the service which I had been using for years to gather up the texts for the readings started blocking access to their service. I suspect they felt I was in violation of their terms of use, or they thought that the crawler which gathered the readings was some type of spam bot. Subsequently, down went sanctus.org. It was unfortunate and unexpected. Initially I began looking into quick fixes, but couldn't find any. I did in due time find an alternative method for gathering up the readings, but the new method required new code, and new code required time - of which I've just not had.

I was forced to put santus.org on hold, unable to spend the time necessary to redevelop the reading retrieval system and so it just sat there. It's not that I don't want to bring the site back up, trust me I do, it's just a lack of time and resources to do so.

There are some preliminary plans in the work for sanctus.org, they involve a re-write and then opening up the source code to the general public so that other Lutheran PHP programmer's can take advantage of the work I've done in their own implementations. My intention is in the next month or so to begin fleshing out the skeleton of a new calendar site for displaying the lectionary. Once that's done I'll have to reassess what the goals for the service itself are. I'm honestly unsure if I will continue the e-mail services I've previously run. As I do work and move forward with getting it back up I will post here, so keep an eye out for updates.