Hello, This is the first MWS since Henri has relinquished the job. It was purely by chance that I began working on it this morning. My apologies for ambiguities. Ken Pooley has offered his services in assisting with production by providing copy editing services. Emiliano Heyns is being volunteered to help identify content for the news letter and provide a programmers perspective on technical issues. All of us provide the only thing that realy matters, the content. We're introducing modifications to the news letters style which now includes short interviews and links to relative articles and discussions. Additionally, we'll start featuring an article that explores a Midgard served website. Your submissions are requested at the end of the MWS. I anticipate including one of these articles every other issue. At this time it appears that we'll continue to release the news letter every Wednsday as has been the standard set by Henri Bergius. Ron "Man of letters and misspellings" Parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] THE MIDGARD WEEKLY SUMMARY copyright 2000 Midgard Project Ry. All Rights Reserved. 8th, May. 2000 Free! The First Year Of Midgard By Henri Bergius 7th May. 2000 It is now a year since Midgard 1.0 was first released on May 8th 1999. While the project has obviously been going on for a longer time than that (first mention of the project is on Bergie's personal Web site, dated April 25th 1998), the 1.0 launch was when the project became public. As it is very easy to only see where the project is now, and forget the long process that has taken us here, I decided to put together a quick look back into major happenings with the project in last year. To summarize, the year was one of quick growth for Midgard. We've gathered a quite sizable community of active users and contributors, and also made inroads to corporate acceptance of Midgard both as an important business tool, and a product. In addition, the Midgard application server itself has evolved much from its modest beginnings, and the development team has had good time working on it. Please note that this document is still in draft state. If you want to make any additions or corrections, please contact Henri Bergius ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) about them. Midgard Debian Package Released Teemu Hukkanen has built a Debian Midgard Package which is being tested by several Midgard developers and users. A discussion is taking place on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list. Because Debian has a strict adherence to the ideal of using "Free Software" and Midgard is primarily reliant on MySQL, which doesn't qualify as free software, this specific package won't become available as part of Debian's "redistributable" software package library. Teemu said, "I do not intend to upload them (debian packages) into debian proper until they can depend on ! mysql." The "! mysql is programmer speak for "other than." The packages are available for download at: http://www.fishpool.com/debian/midgard/. Those interested in using Midgard with Oracle should investigate Jean-Pierre Arneodo's Midgard 1.2.5-beta1 for Oracle. This is not a debian package. Information about Jean-Pierre's release can be found at http://www.midgard-project.org/article/1708.html. Defining Copyright, Publishing Model For The Midgard Manual A discussion concerning the Midgard documentation effort and Midgard Projects Ry's role as a publisher and copyright holder is taking place. Participation by someone experienced in handling Open Source related copyright and publishing issues for documentation would be highly valuable. An effort to understand copyright and publishing interests is currently centered around OpenContent, http://opencontent.org/, and the GNU free Documentation License, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. Both of these organizations offer licensing solutions and it's likely Midgard Projects Ry and the documentation writers will embrace a solution that's developed around one of these licenses. The midgard-dev mailing list archive subject titles for this thread are "Some documentation" and "Documentation License" the archives can be found at: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&w=2&r=1&s=Some+Documentation&q=b Integrating PHPlib Into Midgard Carilda Thomas, Midgard contributer and user, presented a document titled PHP Tools which explains how to integrate PHPlib into Midgard. The document is designed for inclusion in the Midgard Manual. PHPlib is a set of PHP classes created primarily by Kristian Koehntopp to implement visitor sessions, and to present a consistent and easy way to handle forms, tables and data base connections. A search for keyword "phplib" at google.com produces a myriad of on-line articles. The document is being prepared for inclusion in the Midgard CVS tree and should be available for download by 10, May. 2000. Serving File Based Content, Style Emiliano Heyns, Midgard contributer and user, has developed a patch called File Templates which enables the serving of file based content and styles. It's an addition to the standard Midgard database solution. File Templates enables the creation of Midgard applications within files which in some circumstances is a desirable alternative to the database method for modifying and distributing content. Archives of this discusion can be found at: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&m=95747730615628&w=2 According to Heyns, a discussion concerning a PHP-native templating system had taken place on the PHP mailing list at one time. "If we had this thing (File Templates) in a releasable state back then, we may have had that solution," said Heyns. "File Templates is in a very early alpha stage and I need developers and users to help test and decide what functionality to copy from the database templates." Developing A More Encompassing Database Abstraction Layer Emiliano Heyns, Midgard contributer and user, has initiated a discussion that concerns database abstraction. The mailing list archive for this discussion can be found at: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&m=95778965716177&w=2 Heyns said, "I've taken a brief look at GDBC and gnome-db as candidates for a database abstraction layer." Heyns briefly explores the advantages and disadvantages of these options. "GDBC is more light-weight but I have some doubts on it's usability," said Heyns. This discussion is definitely aimed at developers. However, it's implications could have an important effect on users. If a solution is found that meets Debian's qualifictions for "Free Software," Midgard would qualify for inclusion as part of the Debian core distribution. MWS Requests Submissions For News In addition to our usual content, we'd like to cover websites that are being served by Midgard. Of special interest are solutions that aren't obvious to new users. Articles of this nature will be constructed through a process of e-mail exchanges between the webmaster and reporter. If you're interested in having your site featured in MWS, submit a link and brief description of the features that you'd like to share to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MWS is published weekly as a 'free from monetary charge' news letter. Republishing of articles originated by MWS is permitted, although we ask that you inform us of your use of our articles. -- This is The Midgard Project's mailing list. For more information, please visit the project's web site at http://www.midgard-project.org To unsubscribe the list, send an empty email message to address [EMAIL PROTECTED]
