Hi Lee,
All the best for 2000!
> To what extent does Midgard offer personalisation services?
OK, I'll break that up in two pieces: how to recognize persons, and
how to act upon that information.
There are numerous ways to differentiate one person from another, but
these are the easiest when using Midgard:
1. Make people log in via HTTP authentication
2. Authenticate people with the special MidgardLogin cookie
Both of these will authenticate a person against the midgard user
profile
database.
The current release of midgard allows addition of user preferences to
these
profiles, basically domain/name=value tuples, where domain, name and
value
are all free-form text. The upcoming 2.0 release will allow for custom
data to be added to all Midgard records.
Since each Midgard serviced page is in fact a PHP script, and the
Midgard
environment makes information about your visitor available to this
script,
it would be easy to use this information to personalize a page. For
example,
by adding a preference www.midgard-project.org/frames=yes you could flag
that a user prefers frames to tables for layout, or set
frontpage/newsrange=20 to specify that a user would always like to
see the latest 20 news entries on the front page.
> Do you and its other developers hope to offer support and extension
> services for Midgard
We do support Midgard for all our users. The Midgard user base is
slowly shaping up to be self-supporting, so the developer team only has
to tackle the large/complex requests.
If by extension services you mean custom additions to the Midgard core:
we accept all requests for added functionality, and will discuss the
merits and impact on our mailinglist. Most of these requests have either
been incorporated or added to our roadmap.
> I presume one of the problems you face in promoting a product like this is
> making it possible for potential users to size it. Is there any way of
> doing this?
We have a demo host available (http://midgard-demo.marlowes.com/) that
has a full Midgard setup -- anyone is invited to do 'their worst' on
it. We've applied some lockdown patches that preclude messing up the
base system, but you can do pretty much anything on that machine that
you could do on your own Midgard host. The database for that host
is reset every 12 hours.
> I wondered if you had added APIs that allow it to connect to potential
> user's existing databases or legacy systems?
The new 2.0 release will have custom connectors for MySQL and Oracle,
and can connect to other database via ODBC.
For non-Midgard data (enterprise data, stock inventory, etc.) one can
use
the normal PHP database connectors for Adabas D, ODBC, dBase, filePro,
Informix, Interbase, LDAP, MS SQL Server, mSQL, MySQL, Oracle,
PostgreSQL,
Solid and Sybase :) Not something we can claim as an accomplishment
ourselves,
but one of the many benefits of building on a popular and well-supported
language like PHP.
> I wondered what further work there is to do Midgard, what features you
> would like to add, why and when you might add them?
http://www.midgard-project.org/article/997.html shows our roadmap. 2.0
has been delayed slightly.
The why of it is easy: because there's a need :) These additions will
make Midgard an even more solid platform to build on, and incorporate
often-used functionality into the Midgard for efficiency reasons.
> I also wondered if you had any views about Zope and its position compared
> to other application servers? It does also seem to me that the current
> users of Zope use it in applications similar to the applications that
> Midgard has been built to service. Is this view accurate in your opinion?
Both Zope and Midgard are unique in the OSS application server realm for
their strong focus on content-, layout- and user management. These are
things
you want built into your server these days, not added on later, and you
definately don't want to build your own from scratch.
Midgard is compared to Zope often, and I still think it's flattering:
Zope
is an excellent developers platform. And they can indeed be used in
many similar situations. Midgards strong points here would include an
extremely capable and flexible layout system and the fact it builds on
proven technology: we need a webserver, so we use Apache. We need
a scripting language, so we use PHP. Likewise, we'll likely soon
incorporate a search engine into Midgard.
Building like this makes sure that all do what they do/like best. I'm
sure we could build another webserver or search engine, but it's
not our expertise, and excellent implementations exist.
Bye,
Emile
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