Midgard developers meeting

Another Midgard developers meeting. Cool!

This year I didn't fly to Helsinki, but drove with Solt instead. The trip was long but very interesting though. Great opportunity to see Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Especially the last one as we could visit an old city of Tallin. This is very interesting and exciting fact - possibility to travel to many interesting places when you are involved in open-source projects. Like Midgard.

As usual, agenda was changed ad-hoc, but we had interesting discussions about Midgard features. Also many things has been done. The most important ones include:

DBUS in midgard-core. Once again we all agreed, it's a "must be implemented" feature, which will make Midgard yet more powerfull framework.

Alexander explained new GPLv3 licence model. This is very important in open source projects to be licensed with correct and particular license. Especially if you consider the fact that companies like Microsoft used to grant patents on technologies which was initialy released under GPL license. Technologies like MgdSchema which highly extends repligard's one.

Alexander also started to write experimental midgard-php extension's feature to cache already included PHP files. With possibility to also cache (transparently) code included from database.

Bergie and Tarjei did excellent work with creating new centralized system to manage Midgard and MidCOM projects with all their subcomponents. Together with Johan they set up new mailing lists. Amazing! It's one of the best parts of meetings - many people can focus on the same work at the same time. It's not easy to arrange something like this "online". Especially if you consider different time zones, different model of work, different habbits and duties. I must say: Great work guys!.

On Saturday we started Midgard Installation storyboarding. Midgard CMS part is not easy to install as other ones. But, on the other hand it's not just yet another easy CMS. According to our plans and ideas, it will still need root access to install system libraries only but the rest ( like Virtual Hosts or databases ) will be managed via simple command line tools or web browser interfaces. Despite the fact we have many work to do , we should make it reasonably easy and fast as new architecture is language unaware, so setup can be done on many levels with exactly the same logic.

On Sunday we visited Suomenlinna island. Can you believe it? Without computers and internet :) Well... I just turned on my N770 to show how's new midgard-core works on this mobile device. ( Sounds like I can have my personal Midgard in my pocket :) Funny thing , we have been there only couple of hours, but sun managed to burn my face. Remember, this is a place you must visit when you're in Finland.

Great thanks to our sponsors: Maemo, Nemein and FTC. We didn't run out of beer during late night sauna breaks :) ("Night" rather. There is still sun shining about 10pm in Finland. ) And frankly speaking you can blame yourself if you haven't been there. Great people, great time and place. And excellent company for hacking, suana and beer!