Remus

If I look at the mn8 cvs commits, I end up (again) at the conclusion
that this was yet another unproductive week, half the number of
commits than last week. Hmm, this is something very hard to believe.
“mn8” is working more than ever, everything is on it’s way happily
doing as planned every feature I was afraid of seems to work. This
should be the time to frenetically code for the last 100 matters and
still … Maybe is just a matter of discipline?

Finally DataStore seems to get on frozen status, no new bugs
discovered so Crow and Atech are 100% procent on “mn8”. There is only
one trick issue to be solved around the net centered part. It is very
important and decisive for “mn8” and is about integrating the net
part with the query language in an transparent way. In this way you
could do an each query from an URL and the from command would get the
query, select only the variable that can be transformed in a protocol
specific query (HTTP and HTML pages, beep and SEP queries, file and
filtering, …) and filter out the documents before being filtered by
the where clause. If this doesn’t work (but it will) we have serious
problems, you want to work on a couple of documents from an SEP
subtree and that would mean getting all the documents from the
subtree and filtering them, that is a waste of bandwidth and
processing power. This is what Atech is doing now.

Crow was busy doing some word wrapping and is working on stripping out
text from HTML pages. This could prove usefull to convert them to XML
and also to get some result formated in HTML and send them by email.

“HyperPad” is quite usable and stable now, Borzy still have a few bugs
to crash, but it looks and works quite decently, for an Java
application 😉

Got a funny idea last week! “mn8” doesn’t have too many user
interaction possibilities right now, and I don’t think the usual ones
(button, text field, …) have to be directly implemented, but,
concepts could be developed to emulate XForms. Now, having the
concepts for some basic XForms widgets, someone could easily write
a requested interface to the respective concept. Getting a simple
output from the wrapper concept (the one which produce the desired
interface to the concept, just like in MVC) to an external program
which know how to do the rendering on it and to output the resulted
XML to the initial concept and whoala you have the much wanted user
interaction.

The good parts ? First you are not forced to an Java based GUI
application to get the interaction, there are and will be some native
XForms implementations. Second but also important you could provide
a web based form starting from an XForms XML and a nice style sheet
:). Heh you could even have a CLI or a fake user interaction this
way. I can’t wayt to get there, but this will be lateter after the
basic “mn8” will work, in a second phase.

Well, coding, coding, coding, not at the speed I planned or want but features are comming along. I discovered one thing about myself today. I don’t like changed code, it makes me feel bad, like it’s not pure anymore or I don’t trust it, even if I revise it line by line. When the feeling is to overwhelming I write a test case just to make sure! What the hell is wrong with me ? Or maybe is just my ego whom doesn’t like it that the code I produced is not perfect the first time. Yeah that must be!

Read an intresting article at the CIO Magazine. The idea is that most CIO’s are not happy with the commercial software these days. The amount of money spend is just colossal, and the results are I think well known by most of us, I think all of us had a few bad nights about the crap managers pulled on us just to get the piece out in time, without consideration for testing, quality and so on.

Now I have this idea troubling me for some time. Why not make an coalition of OS developers (or teams) and start producing Open Source software for specific enterprise areas. The money would come from sponsoring, in fact most of the CIO’s interviewed would be favorable to an Open Source solution, in fact many companyes could group together to sponsor such an software. Sure, support is needed, but let’s face it if they pay us we will provide the support to. Another issue, that might be a good idea to sponsor local LUG’s, which could act as local support.

The advantages are obvious, quick bug fixes, solid code, interoperability. No more huge maintenance costs (think about $400,000 for only one company) and most important no lock in. Sure it might take a year or two till the software would actually be usable, but I would see it as a good investion.

The disadvantage, who will pay us for our daily job ?