Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 17:37:48 +0300 (EEST)
From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi>
Subject: MWS for 25th of August, 1999 (#13)
To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, chris@linuxdev.net,

Greetings!

Midgard development has been very intensive this week,
with even a few surprises on the road, and while this
has slowed our documentation projects a bit, I believe
it will help Midgard greatly in the long run.

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

Current versions:
	Stable: 1.2 (Mad King)
	Devel.: 1.3 

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

New development branches - 1.2 and 1.3 released

In MWS 12 we announced that we would be releasing
the newest stable version of Midgard, 1.2 on Friday.
At that time, we believed that the development version
we had in our hands would've been ready to be marked
stable.

But then, on that Friday, our testing showed us
that our implementation of ODBC made the server
extremely slow, raising the CPU demands for servers
getting higher amounts of hits. This, of course, 
would have been a big problem on production servers 
(our short test with that version running in 
www.midgard-project.org made the loads climb to 
about 10, which made browsing the site very sluggish.

As soon as we had discovered this problem, we
downgraded our server back to Midgard 1.1.1 and
sat down to discuss the alternatives. After a
while we had a new development strategy in our
hands.

The plan was to split the Midgard code into two
branches, which then would be developed in parallel.
First one, the development series would be where
all improvements would be made, and would go
with the ODBC code. The second one would be the
stable series, with all the features of the 
development series, but with the old MySQL-dependent
database connectivity code.

To get this new strategy working, we released
the ODBC-enabled version as a development release
marked 1.3 on Friday. Then, on the following
Monday we patched the new Midgard library with
the old database code from the 1.1 series, and
released that as 1.2, the "Mad King" stable
version.

Now the plan is to continue development on
the 1.3 series, with the most improvements
trickling back to the stable series.

The development series will also be worked
on in order to fix the problems with the ODBC
code, and make the system work with also other
ODBC-compliant databases besides MySQL. We
also plan to move most of Midgard's functions
from the PHP module to Midgard's libraries so
that we can later on enable things like CORBA
and use of Midgard functions in other languages.

While the development roadmap hasn't yet been
updated to reflect these changes, there is
some information about the new architectural
changes in a note Jukka wrote to Midgard's
mailing list:

 -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=midgard&m=93539636102899&w=2
----------------------------

Internationalization in Midgard

The topic of making Midgard work better with
multi-lingual Web sites came up as Torben
Nehmer contacted Jukka and told he would be
working on a German version of the Midgard
Admin Site. At the moment Midgard doesn't quite
have any standard mechanisms for i18n, except
for the Topic system, and so discussion on the
possibilities would be most welcome.

If we get any good suggestions on how to do
this, we will make them part of Midgard's
architecture with a quite high priority.

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

Midgard Workshop on October 13th in Helsinki, Finland

At the moment it seems that nobody opposes the
idea to hold the first Midgard Workshop on Wednesday
13th of October. The workshop will be held in the
training facilities of the companies sponsoring
the event.

The event will be free, and open for anyone interested
in learning how to use Midgard. We number of participants
we can take will be restricted so that we can ensure
that there is room for everyone attending, and there
will be a mail address announced later on for registering
to the event. The instruction will be held in English,
and all material will also be posted to Midgard's Web
site after the event.

When our plans and the schedule for the event are
readier, I will send out a more formal announcement
on this. In the meanwhile, contact me for further
information.

The date is still not set in stone, and if any good
reasons to change it appear during the next week, we
will still reconsider it.

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

Documentation project

The effort to create a manual for Midgard is now
underway, with the outline scheduled to be ready
in the next few days. Some people have already
announced their interest to take a responsibility
area within the manual, and will be coordinating
the work on those topics.

We are still interested in getting more volunteers
to this project. If you would like to work on the
manual, please contact me.

The manual will at least include the following
topics:

  - a Management Summary, which is partly covered by
  the vision statement on the site. It should be a (mostly)
  full description of Midgard, Midgards' strong points, and
  name a few traits which set it apart from the 'competition'
  (without actually naming the competition).
  It gives a birds-eye view of Midgard, and would allow a
  decision-maker to evaluate its use for a particular project
  without forcing him/her to study it in depth.

  - Installation & getting started. Eddie has done great work
  here.

  - Midgard Management (users, security, delegating responsibility).

  - Midgard Basics: build a basic (non-dynamic) Midgard site. Use
  of the template system, updating content, etc.

  - Midgard development: Building a dynamic site with Midgard. Covers
  Midgard/PHP (we should get a good term to refer to the Midgard php
  extensions), building a customized admin site.

  - Midgard in-depth: Deep voodoo. Midgard core architecture, extending
  Midgard, etc.

(Thanks, Emile!)

You can follow the discussion thread on Midgard's mailing
list at:

  -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?t=93498315900008&w=2&d=1&r=1

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

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 Developer's Network
   -> http://linuxdev.net
   
 -Open Source Writer's Group
   -> http://www.thepuffingroup.com/oswg

 -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