[TYPO3-hci] Slightly OT: Is the current 4.5 Roadmap wrong?

[Phillip]

Hi.
Yesterday night I took the time to install the T3 Database localy and  
reverse engineer it into Eclipse/Clay.
32 tables. Zero DB level relations enforced with foreign keys.
Within seconds I found at least 2 large things that would need  
normalization imediately, before attempting anything else. After  
browsing the model for a few minutes you could literaly see where  
Kasper or some other Coredev went into a coding spree and added some  
new feature. Recognizable either by field-naming or entity-clusters  
with simular naming. Don't get me wrong: This is no critique. T3 is  
historically grown and that allways shows in software of this size.  
Coding is done by humans and with a specific result in mind at a  
given time. And one can also overdo it with abstraction and design.  
Besides, I've looked at the guts other PHP/MySQL CMSes and compared  
to some of them T3 is the hallmark of clean design. :-)
On top of that, we all know that back then and up to a year ago MySQL  
wasn't a Database but more some kind of Flatfile with an SQL  
Frontend. And that it really didn't matter wether you had a datamodel  
or not. You'd just write the stuff whereever you felt it would fit at  
the time.
But PHP and MySQL finally have arived in th big league. Given that  
the system requirements for T3 are at the top end of PHP CMSes anyway  
I'd say one needn't hesitate and require a minimum of MySQL 5 and PHP  
5.1 for the next major version of T3.

But the most important thing to BE design is: I honestly am starting  
to think we should consider the old T3 finished. The post-classic  
frame-based backend got a new skin this year. It looks a little  
better *and* still is what the year long crowd of T3 backend users is  
used to. Shouldn't we just do a little maintainance, content  
abstraction and naming cleanup for 4.5 and leave it at that? Instead  
focus on tearing T3 apart and rebuilding it from scratch while  
accepting the proven usage concepts as a given, but building an  
entirely new persistance layer, offloading object-relational logic to  
lower parts of the system. We could totally abstract the BE and make  
a larger attempt to streamline the backend GUI. The possiblities are  
endless. I'd rather stick with the current BE knowing that we'll have  
a new Architecture in place faster and then will be able to do lots  
of neat BE stuff.

What I'm saying here is that not only the state of the backend and  
the fact that it's sort of arived in a fully developed 'dead-end'  
situation but also the state of T3 as a whole actually asks for  
moving a total GUI redo to a place where we have a post-5.0 situation.

I could imagine that this topic has been discussed already or is  
being discussed among coredevs right now. Are there any conclusions  
to this allready?

Phillip