Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 20:57:33 +0300 (EEST)
From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi>
Subject: MWS for 1st of September, 1999 (#14)
To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, chris@linuxdev.net,

Greetings!

Another busy week has passed, giving us many
things to announce.

While the actual development of Midgard has 
gained speed nicely throughout the summer, the
documentation project hasn't still progressed
much. We have the guidelines set, but results
haven't been yet showing up. And at the moment
things are even slower than usual on that front.

Jean-Pierre Arneodo (function reference) is
on vacation, many of the volunteers from OSWG
have dropped from the project due to lack of
free time or other personal reasons. Jukka and
I have been busy with the Web site projects we
have at work. The situation will hopefully
improve after most of the sites we are now
working on are launched in mid-September (quite
interesting stuff, lots of personalization and
operative applications, all done in Midgard),
and we can concentrate more on documentation.

Meanwhile (and of course later on, too!), all 
volunteer contributions will be accepted gratefully.
If you are interested, please contact me about
the areas of documentation that need work.

And by the way, the next stable release, Midgard 
1.2.1 should be out tomorrow and contain some
bug fixes, support for cleartext passwords, and
other stuff.

But now to the headlines...

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

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

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

Midgard Workshop Registrations

We have now received confirmation from both
Stonesoft Corp. and Takomo Finland Oy that the
date we set for the Workshop will be acceptable
for them. So now it is official, we will hold
on Wednesday October 13th the first Midgard
Workshop, a training and development event for
Midgard users in Helsinki, Finland.

The even will be free, but as we have to limit
the amount of attendees for practical reasons,
we require everyone interested in participating
to send a registration email to me 
(Henri.Bergius@iki.fi). I will also be happy
to provide further information on the event.

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

Midgard in Linux-Mandrake 6.1

We have just received word from Jean-Michel Dault
that the next release of MandrakeSoft's Linux
distribution, Linux-Mandrake 6.1 will ship with
the latest stable version of Midgard. This makes
it the first commercial product to contain the
Midgard Application Server.

Furthermore, Linux-Mandrake will use the Midgardized
PHP module as its default PHP implementation, meaning
that developers using the distribution can start
working with the normal PHP environment, and then
just drop Midgard in by installing the database when
they need the features our application server provides.

These are great news, and we thank Jean-Michel and
everyone else involved for making this happen!

  -> http://www.linux-mandrake.com/

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

Red Hat binaries of Midgard 1.2

Emile Heyns has made the RPM binaries of Midgard 1.2 
for the Red Hat 6.0 Linux distribution available on
Midgard's binary download pages.

For those needing them, the Source RPMs and Spec
files can also be downloaded from there.

  -> http://www.midgard-project.org/article/1172.html

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

MySQL 3.20.32a now under GPL

An older version of the MySQL database server
has been released by T.c.X. DataKonsult AB under
the GNU General Public License.

This older version of MySQL misses some key 
features required by Midgard, and so cannot be
yet used with Midgard. Jukka has promised to
attend to the matter, however, and so we can
expect a version of Midgard that works with
the GPLd database soon.

There was some discussion on the difficulties
involved on the Midgard mailing list:

  -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?t=93615179300001&w=2&d=1&r=1
  
-----------------------------

Midgard in high load environments

Some users have been interested in running
Midgard on high load sites. While Midgard
has so far been only used on sites under
low to moderate amount of load, there is
some clue on how it would behave in more
demanding situations, and so there were some
long threads on the subject in the mailing
list.

The overall consensus seems to be that best
way to get Midgard (or any application server
for that matter) to scale to the demands is
to have a some sort of caching mechanism for
the most common pages requested.

At the moment the recommendation is to use
an external cache system such as squid, but
according to Jukka a native Midgard solution
might be in plans later on.

You can follow the main thread at Midgard's
mailing list archives:

  -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?t=93565897200001&w=2&d=1&r=1

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

Midgard and FreeBSD

It seems that our users on the FreeBSD platform
have had problems with getting Midgard to 
compile. Although most of these seem to be result
of Midgard needing GNU make, a more permanent
solution could be needed in the long run.

Because of this, we would like to have someone
with *BSD experience in the project, who then
could ensure that Midgard compiles and runs
without problems on the platform, and possibly
provide binary packages as well.

If you are a FreeBSD user or developer and are 
interested in Midgard please contact either
me or the Midgard mailing list!

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

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 Writers 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