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