Midgard Weekly Summary for 8th of May, 2000 (#37)

Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 04:11:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: parker@momma.mi-recordz.com
To: marty@linuxtoday.com
Subject: Midgard: Weekly Summary

MWS for 8th of May, 2000 (#37)

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 Wednesday as has been the standard set by Henri
Bergius.

---

Current versions:

Stable: 1.2.5

‘

Mad King

’

Devel.: 1.4beta.3

Oracle: 1.2.5 Oracle 8i

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The First Year Of Midgard

Henri Bergius has written a time line on the last year’s
happenings with the Midgard project.

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 (Henri.Bergius@iki.fi) about them.

Learn more:
http://www.midgard-project.org/article/1712.html

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Midgard Debian Packages Released Teemu Hukkanen has built a Debian
Midgard Packages which are being tested by several Midgard
developers and users. A discussion is taking place on the Midgard
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 Teemu’s Web site.

Learn more:
http://www.fishpool.com/debian/midgard/

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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 and the GNU free
Documentation License. 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:

Learn more:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&w=2…

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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.

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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.

This discusion can be found at the mailing list archives.

Learn more:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&m=9…

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Developing A More Encompassing Database Abstraction Layer Emiliano
Heyns, Midgard contributer and user, has initiated a discussion
that concerns database abstraction.

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.

The discussion for this can be found at the mailing list
archives.

Learn more:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-dev&m=9…

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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 inMWS, submit a link
and brief description of the features that you’d like to share to
parker@mi-recordz.com.

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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
-> https://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