Greetings!
Of late there has been lots of discussion about what
will Mozilla need before it can be seen as an alpha
release. I've also seen some mentions about when
Midgard is 'ready for mainstream'. Now, what could
be useful is discussion about what people see that
will still be needed before Midgard is ready to be
used by a generic Web developer with not that much
experience of conventional programming.
I think we all agree that Midgard isn't quite there
yet. Sure, it is stable, fast and quite featured, but
there are some points that still need addressing
before it can be seen as ready for wider usage.
Here is list of things I see we should get done
before Midgard reaches that state. Consequently,
this is also a listing of things I'd like to see
before we release the first stable release of
the Midgard 2 branch.
-Database independence
Midgard users should be able to use their system with
whatever database their environment demands, as long
as it is ODBC compliant. This would end the license
problems we have now and also make Midgard a more
acceptable choice for many organizations who already
have policies on what databases to use in their systems.
Also native interfaces to some major databases (Oracle,
MySQL, ...) would be a good thing for efficiency.
-Packaging and replication mechanism
This is a feature that would enable Midgard administrators
install, package and remove applications or content from
their Midgard database. This means that installation and
distribution of Midgard utilities and example code will
be much easier as no playing around with database dumps and
difficult ID numbers is needed. Also, this way copying
data from a development server into a production environment
will be much easier than it is now
-Access control
The current access control mechanisms in Midgard are still
very crude, and can cause lot of problems in environments
where security and control of available data is important.
Emile's work in this area seems very promising so we will
hopefully see new handling of access control in Midgard 2.
-Binary versions
At the moment Midgard is still quite difficult to install.
I think we should modify our release policies so that now
there would be a short period between getting a release
version ready and actually releasing it. This would give
enough time for our packagers and testers to get bugs found
and fixed and binaries prepared. Currently we have only
Red Hat / i386 binaries available of our recent releases,
but I'd like to also see some other platforms there. At
least Debian, FreeBSD and Solaris would be nice, and also
win32 depending on how quickly the OpenSA people get their
port done.
-Documentation
Nowadays Midgard's documentation is still pretty much
nonexistent and this is something that needs changing.
The learning curve is too steep to most Web developers.
We probably won't need the full manual at once, but
having at least a complete function reference and a
simple 'Getting started' guide would help enormously
here. The guide wouldn't have to include more than
installation instructions on some common setups and
explanation of the process of creating a simple site
(something as basic as the example site) with Midgard.
So, this was my list, please feel free to add your
comments to this.
What I'm hoping is that this discussions would make the
path towards Midgard 2 a bit easier as the features
and additions needed for that would be more clearly
defined.
/Bergie
--
-- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius
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