Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 16:59:38 +0300 (EEST)
From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi>
Subject: MWS on your site
To: lwn@lwn.net


Greetings!

MWS for 8th of May, 2000 (#37)

This is the first MWS since Henri has relinquished the job. It was purely by
chance that I began working on it this morning. My apologies for ambiguities.
Ken Pooley has offered his services in assisting with production by providing
copy editing services. Emiliano Heyns is being volunteered to help identify
content for the news letter and provide a programmers perspective on technical
issues. All of us provide the only thing that realy matters, the content.

We're introducing modifications to the news letters style which now includes
short interviews and links to relative articles and discussions. Additionally,
we'll start featuring an article that explores a Midgard served website. Your
submissions are requested at the end of the MWS. I anticipate including one of
these articles every other issue. 

At this time it appears that we'll continue to release the news letter every
Wednesday as has been the standard set by Henri Bergius. 

============================
----------------------------

Current versions:
        Stable: 1.2.5 'Mad King'
        Devel.: 1.4beta.3
	Oracle: 1.2.5 Oracle 8i

----------------------------
============================

The First Year Of Midgard

Henri Bergius has written a time line on the last year's happenings with the
Midgard project. 

It is now a year since Midgard 1.0 was first released on May 8th 1999. While the
project has obviously been going on for a longer time than that (first mention
of the project is on Bergie's personal Web site, dated April 25th 1998), the
1.0 launch was when the project became public. 

As it is very easy to only see where the project is now, and forget the long
process that has taken us here, I decided to put together a quick look back
into major happenings with the project in last year. 

To summarize, the year was one of quick growth for Midgard. We've gathered a
quite sizable community of active users and contributors, and also made inroads
to corporate acceptance of Midgard both as an important business tool, and a
product. In addition, the Midgard application server itself has evolved much
from its modest beginnings, and the development team has had good time working
on it. 

Please note that this document is still in draft state. If you want to make any
additions or corrections, please contact Henri Bergius (Henri.Bergius@iki.fi)
about them. 

Learn more: http://www.midgard-project.org/article/1712.html

----------------------------

Midgard Debian Packages Released
Teemu Hukkanen has built a Debian Midgard Packages which are being tested by
several Midgard developers and users. A discussion is taking place on the
Midgard mailing list. 

Because Debian has a strict adherence to the ideal of using "Free Software" and
Midgard is primarily reliant on MySQL, which doesn't qualify as free software,
this specific package won't become available as part of Debian's 
"redistributable" software package library. Teemu said, "I do not intend to
upload them (debian packages) into debian proper until they can depend on
! mysql." The "! mysql is programmer speak for "other than." The packages are
available for download at Teemu's Web site. 

Learn more: http://www.fishpool.com/debian/midgard/

----------------------------

Defining Copyright, Publishing Model For The Midgard Manual
A discussion concerning the Midgard documentation effort and Midgard Projects
Ry's role as a publisher and copyright holder is taking place. Participation by
someone experienced in handling Open Source related copyright and publishing
issues for documentation would be highly valuable. 

An effort to understand copyright and publishing interests is currently centered
around OpenContent and the GNU free Documentation License. Both of these
organizations offer licensing solutions and it's likely Midgard Projects Ry and
the documentation writers will embrace a solution that's developed around one
of these licenses. 

The midgard-dev mailing list archive subject titles for this thread are "Some
documentation" and "Documentation License" the archives can be found at: 

Learn more: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&w=2...

----------------------------

Integrating PHPlib Into Midgard
Carilda Thomas, Midgard contributer and user, presented a document titled PHP
Tools which explains how to integrate PHPlib into Midgard. 

The document is designed for inclusion in the Midgard Manual. PHPlib is a set
of PHP classes created primarily by Kristian Koehntopp to implement visitor
sessions, and to present a consistent and easy way to handle forms, tables and
data base connections. A search for keyword "phplib" at google.com produces a
myriad of on-line articles. The document is being prepared for inclusion in the
Midgard CVS tree and should be available for download by 10, May. 2000. 

----------------------------

Serving File Based Content, Style
Emiliano Heyns, Midgard contributer and user, has developed a patch called File
Templates which enables the serving of file based content and styles.

It's an addition to the standard Midgard database solution. File Templates
enables the creation of Midgard applications within files which in some
circumstances is a desirable alternative to the database method for modifying
and distributing content. 

This discusion can be found at the mailing list archives. 

Learn more: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&m=9...

----------------------------

Developing A More Encompassing Database Abstraction Layer
Emiliano Heyns, Midgard contributer and user, has initiated a discussion that
concerns database abstraction. 

Heyns said, "I've taken a brief look at GDBC and gnome-db as candidates for a
database abstraction layer." Heyns briefly explores the advantages and
disadvantages of these options. "GDBC is more light-weight but I have some
doubts on it's usability," said Heyns. This discussion is definitely aimed at
developers. However, it's implications could have an important effect on users.
If a solution is found that meets Debian's qualifictions for "Free Software,"
Midgard would qualify for inclusion as part of the Debian core distribution. 

The discussion for this can be found at the mailing list archives. 

Learn more: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&m=9...

----------------------------

MWS Requests Submissions For News
In addition to our usual content, we'd like to cover websites that are being
served by Midgard. 

Of special interest are solutions that aren't obvious to new
users. Articles of this nature will be constructed through a process of
e-mail exchanges between the webmaster and reporter. If you're interested
in having your site featured inMWS, submit a link and brief description of
the features that you'd like to share to parker@mi-recordz.com.

----------------------------

============================
============================

About Midgard

Midgard is a freely-available Web application 
development and publishing platform based on 
the popular PHP scripting language. It is an 
Open Source development project, giving you the 
freedom to create your solutions in an open 
environment. Midgard is the tool for creating, 
modifying and maintaining dynamic 
database-enabled web services.

  -> http://www.midgard-project.org

----------------------------

About MWS

The Midgard Weekly Summary is a newsletter 
for the Midgard user and developer community.

The MWS is currently being distributed in
following mediums:

 -The Midgard Project's Web site
   -> http://www.midgard-project.org

 -Linux Weekly News
   -> http://www.lwn.net

 -Linux Today
   -> http://www.linuxtoday.com

 -Linux Developer's Network
   -> http://linuxdev.net

 -LinuxProgramming
   -> http://www.linuxprogramming.com

 -Midgard mailing list

If you would like to release it elsewhere,
please contact Henri Bergius 
(Henri.Bergius@iki.fi).

Previous issues of Midgard Weekly Summary can 
be found archived at the Midgard web site.
  -> http://www.midgard-project.org/topic/169.html

/Bergie

--
-- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- Henri.Bergius@iki.fi --
               http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius