Greetings!
Wednesday! And here is this week's MWS. This week there is an interview
with Alexander Bokovoy, keeper of the Midgard 1.4 flame. Also there is news
of the transition of Midgard-Project.org to a new home. I am still looking
for people who are using Midgard in the real world and would be willing to
look at their site as a case study for what Midgard does and how. Let me
know. Have a grand week!
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Current versions:
Stable: 1.2.5 'Mad King'
Devel.: 1.4beta.5
Oracle: 1.2.5 Oracle 8i
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A new home for Midgard-Project.org
Armand Verstappen has been working on moving the main Midgard Project
server to a new home. The goal of moving the server is to provide the
Midgard community with a more reliable dedicated machine to serve the
community's needs. Armand is a partner in Envida, a Midgard Hosting company
in the Netherlands and a Midgard Project Ry Board member.
The decision to move from the current server was initiated by Henri Bergius
this summer. The current server is located unofficially at Helsinki
University, with no official mandate to be there, and is on an aging
machine. As the project has grown in magnitude and traffic volume the
server has become less reliable and Henri started looking for a source of a
dedicated server for the project. Aurora Architecte Open Source, of Paris,
France offered a server as well as space and bandwidth to host the server.
As there are a number of Midgard Project Ry members working at Aurora this
proved to be an advantageous arrangement. Other offers from companies like
Laniflesx and Netrex were also accepted with those sites being asked to
mirror the main server.
Verstappen has outlined a phased migration to the new server:
" First a fresh Linux installation on the new server, then the installation
of security, monitoring and administration packages. Then the migration of
the Midgard Site, Migration of DNS, migration of CVS, migration of
mailinglists, migration of archives."
The new server will be set up initially to run Midgard 1.4b5a. Verstappen
points out,
" The real challenge will be the migration of the Midgard Database. The old
server is running 1.2.4, we will have to copy over that database, and then
upgrade the tables using the upgrade scripts. Then we'll move the data to a
sitegroup and weed out the sites we don't need (remember, there are some 30
other sites on the old server). There is a lot of room for error there.
Luckily we control DNS, so we can hold off the final move until we've got
the database migration right."
In addition to its obvious benefit to those who need to track down that
online function reference at 2:00am, the server migration should provide a
good case study for those who will be moving their own servers from 1.2x to
1.4 over the next few months. Look forward to reading newbie notes
concerning this process in a few weeks.
Armand can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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An Interview with Alexander Bokovoy: Keeper of Midgard 1.4
Alexander Bokovoy is a teacher of computer science in the natural sciences
department of the National Institute of Higher Education of Belarussian
State University, in Minsk, Belarus. He has an MS in Mathematics and
Computer Science. He is interested in fractal geometry, geometry, web
design & programming and Open Source software development. He is also a
member of the Minsk Linux Users Group. Alexander has been an active
contributor to the Midgard community and was recently anointed keeper of
the last version of the 1.x software tree.
KP- How did you become involved with Midgard?
AB- I was looking for some kind of software usable for managing/creating
educational
resources for Math & CS teaching during 1999's autumn . I thought that, of
course,
this software must be from the Open Source world because our institutions
can't buy
proprietary products for several reasons (and the financial one least).
After
spending several weeks of testing/selecting, I found Midgard. It was
Midgard 1.2.3. I
found that it is very simple to support non-Latin-1 languages (especially
Cyrillic
ones) and after 3 days of patches and translation work Russian Midgard was
born. It included configuration options for low-level Midgard libraries and
Admin
Site translated to Russian. Since Midgard 1.2.5, it has been included in
the 'official'
Midgard distribution.
After release of Midgard 1.2.5, the development team concentrated on the
work for Midgard
2.0, but I thought that we needed something more usable in a shorter period
than
version 2.0 offered. That's why branch 1.2.x was continued and that's why
now we
have Midgard 1.4 development tree. In February, 2000, when Jukka Zitting
(the original
developer of Midgard) discontinued his active developments, the Midgard
team decided
to make me a maintainer of Midgard 1.x tree while Emiliano Heyns has been
elected as
maintainer of Midgard 2.0 project.
KP - Do you use Midgard in a real world situation?
AB - Yes. We are using it to maintain the MLUG site (www.minsk-lug.net)
andI'm planning to use it for my lectures at NIHE. Also there are several
plans for deploying Midgard-based sites during this Autumn and Winter. Most
of them are science-related.
KP- What has the reality of administrating a midgard site been like, how
has it influenced the development of the new versions?
AB-In reality, a well written Midgard site requires almost no intervention
in administration. For example, I hadn't used MLUG's Admin Site for past
three months. Instead, we wrote own administrative interface which looks
like MLUG site and provides instant access to articles and topics on it. We
have the same on Midgard-Project.org -- it looks like people are working
with 'preview' of the site, not with Admin Site itself. Of course,
practical requirements influence Midgard development. For example, if you
look into midgard-dev archive
(http://bergie.greywolves.org:8081/archive/midgard-dev/), you'll find that
in last two months we added some functionality to article's management, as
requested by our users. The same is true with Asgard development: if
something is very inefficient in PHP, it'll receive a prototype in core
functions -- that's why mgd_walk_xxx_tree() arrived, as well as
CodeSnippets, and error diagnostics (which also was required by users). For
example, if you're using CodeSnippet and an error has been found in it, PHP
will show you a name of CodeSnippet along with path to it and number of
line with error (i.e. /Asgard/Functions/MyFunction, line ###).
KP- How has development gone with 1.4? Are you pretty confident of
makingthe beginning of October release?
AB - There are several 'to do' tasks we have to accomplish yet. First, we
must makeAsgard the new administration site. Second, we must make the
transition to PHP4. Third, the installation procedure must be made
smoother. Integration with PHP4 requires rewrite of many parts of Midgard's
code because the internals of PHP have been changed since introduction of
Zend. This task require serious investigation of internal Zend API which
is, in turn, poorly documented (the only book on it is Ratschiller&Gerken's
"Web Application Development with PHP 4.0' released in July). The
installation procedure also requires improvement, mostly because Midgard is
able to work on many platforms which differ significantly in paths to
libraries and configuration files. While it allows administrators to
fine-tune the system, this common UNIX feature complicates a developer's
work, especially for Open Source projects which give to the user a
possibility to recompile application to his/her needs. That's why we have
so many questions regarding Midgard installation.
KP- While 1.4 will be a huge improvement for Midgard it seems like there
are still some architectural limitations to the application. What will the
integration of php 4 bring to Midgard 1.4.?
AB- Integration with PHP4 will bring several good features to Midgard.
First, PHP4 is much more scalable than PHP3, it has a very fast language
engine Zend, and is capable of handling large projects. Second, being a
standard module for PHP4, Midgard will be more distributed and chances that
people will have an offer of Midgard hosting from ISPs will be higher.
Also, migration to Zend allows us to improve our styling system and create
a more powerful Midgard.
KP- What features do you think are key to the future of Midgard, will they
come in v1.4 or v2?
AB- In short, they are Internalization, Modularization, Security
andUserfriendness. All of these we plan to implement in Midgard 2.0, with
possible approximations for Midgard 1.4. It is hard, however, to follow all
these concepts in version 1.4 due constraints of architecture design of
Midgard 1.x branch. For example the access system in Midgard 1.4 lacks read
permissions, which will be added in Midgard 2.0. Midgard 1.4 has no
support for multibyte encodings and Unicode which complicates Midgard's
usage in East countries. This is also true in multi-language environments
where several languages have overlapped eight-bit encodings and have
different rules for formatting in HTML code. (For example, Cyrillic and
French: Cyrillic doesn't have HTML entities like Ó ç and so
on, while for French they are mandatory).
KP- What have been the hardest parts of getting 1.4 finished? Are
therestill challenges left in finishing the final candidate?
AB - The hardest part is Repligard. We still have 'proof-of-the-concept'
only.
Repligard is the tool for two-way replication for the Midgard database. Due
constraints of Midgard 1.x architectural design it is hard to implement
two-way replication without modifications in Midgard's core. It creates a
bigger amount of work and also requires developer's forces which are
limited when we talk about core development -- there are not too many
developers who can help at the core -- mostly because it requires the steep
learning curve of Midgard and PHP's internals in the beginning.
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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
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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
([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
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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