From: Ken Pooley <kpooley@sewanee.edu>
To: "'midgard@greywolves.org'" <midgard@greywolves.org>,
Subject: MWS for 24th of Aug, 2000 (#44)
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 16:35:07 -0500

Greetings!

Another week, another MWS! Below is an interview with
Ron Parker who is working hard on the documentation efforts for Midgard. 
There is also the start to a discussion for the whole community on how best to
get across what Midgard is and what it does. The next few weeks should bring
the continued final work on Midgard 1.4 as well as much more concrete discussion
about Midgard2.0 and what it will bring.


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Current versions:
        Stable: 1.2.5 'Mad King'
        Devel.: 1.4beta.4
	Oracle: 1.2.5 Oracle 8i

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An Interview with Ron Parker about Documentation and Midgard 2.0

Ron Parker is a writer and music expert from Wisconsin, USA. While quietly writing
the MWS one day he was tapped to travel to Paris, a long way from Wisconsin,
to work on the efforts to update and complete the documentation for Midgard versions
both old and new. Documentation has been an ongoing process for the Midgard 
community and the concentrated efforts that Ron and a few others have brought
to the project will make a huge difference in the long run.



 KP--
 It seems like there are a lot of efforts to work on the documentation for
 Midgard. What is the state of the documentation at this point? How much of
 what you are doing expands on what had been done before and how much is
 being done to anticipate 2.0 as it is in the works?
 
 RP--
 We don't have adequate documentation. I've compared our documentation to
 Zope's and modeled a strategy to avoid producing an indecipherable
 Hodge-podge like they have. The primary difference between them and us is
 they've got a bigger mess than we do. I don't mind criticizing Zope
 because I've recently discovered that they've got a solution. I think
 things are looking good in the Zope documentation camp. They've got a
 contract with O'Reilly and will replace the on-line documentation with the
 material that's being written and edited for the book.
 
 I'm really saying, good for them and take note Midgard developers because
 we must have documentation that's as good or better than what they're now
 producing. If our product isn't as good as there's, the market will
 choose them over us even when if our product is more suited to more
 address their challenge. Remember Midgard is a Content Publishing tool
 while Zope is an Application Server. They're different animals.
 Application servers are optimized for transactions and solving business
 logic. Content management is about serving data.
 
 Anyway, back to your question; almost everything we're doing now is from
 scratch. We're producing a combination of marketing and technical white
 papers. The work we're doing now is designed to accurately define Midgard for what
 it really is. The first document I wrote says, "Application
 Server." In fact, Midgard isn't an application server. Midgard 1.4 is
 a Content Publishing Tool. When Aurora, a Paris, France Open Source
 start-up, first contacted me, I was under the impression that they and I
 were  interested in producing User documentation for 1.4. My boss, Jean-Philippe
 Brunnon, introduced a set of challenges which have changed the focus of
 the documentation effort.
 
 The first challenge focuses the effort of the entire project on
 developing Midgard 2.0. This branch will be a complete rewrite. If we
 focus our attention full-time on 1.4, we'll release the documentation at
 the time that 2.0 is available. There's no better way to assess this
 strategy than to say it would be stupid to spend time writing extensive
 documentation for 1.4.
 
 Midgard 2.0 is being designed as a Content Management system. Bruno
 Abitbol, Aurora employee and Midgard developer, has implemented the
 Midgard database in LDAP and is testing ease of feature implementation.
 I've seen his SiteGroups solution and it's a significant improvement over
 the  current Midgard layer strategy. This improvement translates to
 ease of implementation at the user level. Of course, we've gotta run
 performance tests.
 
 My personal aspirations are to produce a document for programmers and end
 users that third party publishers will knife fight over. The Aurora
 management and I have begun discussing a contract and strategy for
 producing Open Source Content Management (Midgard 2.0). Aurora is
 interested in co-publishing in order share financial investment and
 accelerate the production rate. The impetus is to marry the name
 Aurora with Midgard. Coming from the Midgard camp, I respect their
 investment and am beginning to learn about their interest. Developing a
 relationship has been a challenge but I am hopeful. I see good things and
 have even learned a couple French words.
 
 
 
 KP --
 How big is the core group of authors? Are they connected geographically
  or just electronically. How hard is it to get all of the parts to work
 together?
 
 RP --
 Armand Verstappen has been contracted by Aurora to produce the function
 reference documentation. Of course the core developers offer technical
 related feedback when asked and if they've got time. Simon Kerr has worked
 with Patrick Duplouy to create a the first draft documents for the 1.4
 technical white papers. Cedric Musso has contributed mostly by managing
 and redesigning our docbook strategy. Many people worked to produce the
 material that's in the on-line manual. The current effort is not
 working with that material. I focus my attention on the coffee pot and my
 depleted cache of cigars.
 
 
 
 KP --
 1.2.5 and 1.4 are still basically based on the first versions of
  Midgard. How much more difficult, or less difficult, is it to document 1.4
  when it is a transition from the earlier versions, which you may not 
  had as much to do with, to an anticipated version that you
  are involved with.
 
 RP --
 I'm a writer who started using Midgard so I could be exposed to people
 that know what they're doing. I can't read mod_midgard and write a
 document that describes what the damned thing does. From my perspective,
 the challenge isn't presented by differences between 1.2 and 1.4. The real
 problem is in the absence of Requirements documentation that describe why
 something was implemented and how a relative piece of code solves the
 problem. This is the material that's needed to produce documentation.
 
 I recently stole a book that was purchased for Alexander Bokovoy titled
 Practical Software Requirements, Manning, it'll be a cold day in a place
 that's consistently hot before I forward this book to its rightful owner.
 I desperately need to understand Software Engineering and this book is
 helping. My challenge is to understand the ideal process for producing
 software and documentation,  formulate a strategy that's realistic for
 Midgard, call the cow into the barn and extract the milk. You can make all
 kinds of good stuff with milk.
 
 Jean-Philippe Brunnon, Aurora project manager, has just handed me a
 first version of the Midgard 2.0 White Paper. No code has been written for
 2.0 and there's some documentation. This white paper will tell our user
 and developer communities what to expect. This allows input during the
 design phase because these documents will live in CVS.
 
 
 KP--
 Do you have a sense yet for what 2.0 will be like from an administrators
 point of view?
 
 RP--
 I believe load balancing, redundancy, data syncing, user and access
 management will move Midgard administrators into an entirely different
 level of problem solving.
 
 We're developing a 2.0 Content Management solution that is Open Source
 from the backend to the webserver. It'll be scalable so developers who
 wish to implement commercial solutions like an Oracle RDBMS will be able
 to. J-P's 2.0 White Paper lists ascending compatibility with 1.4 as the
 first requirement of 2.0.  Also, comrade Bokovoy has met a developer at
 a database conference in Minsk, Belarus who has implemented a MySQL 
to LDAP interface. Jean-Philippe is looking at that code to see how the 
relational tables are mapped to the LDAP tree structures. This work is
interesting for the Midgard efforts.

 Midgard 2.0 looks like a serious problem solver. From my perspective it
 looks like Aspirin on steroids.

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Jean-Philippe Brunon at Aurora opens discussion on promoting Midgard.

Jean-Philippe Brunon, of Aurora, has opened an important discussion about
the means by which we can, essentially, market Midgard. While the benefit for 
Aurora may be somewhat evident, we as a community also get a great deal from 
the success of Midgard; better software, more development resources and 
someone on the other end of that desperate 2 AM email when things just won't
work. Jean-Philippe had a few salient points as he walked through the means
by which people find out about Midgard. From finding Midgard, to finding out
about Midgard, to finally installing and implementing Midgard. As Jean-Philippe
pointed out, the number of increasingly high hurdles and enduser faces at each
stage along the way is daunting at best. We are all involved making those hurdles
less problematic but it would be worth while to look at the way we market our efforts.
Last week I called for those using Midgard for public sites to submit URLs to the 
Midgard-Project.org website for inclusion on the list of sites using Midgard. 
Other suggestions would be welcomed as well as feed-back as the development
cycle for 1.4 and 2.0 continues. Jean-Philippe's e-mail, with the follow-up, can
be found at: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard&m=96710715105929&w=2


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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

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