Welcome to the inaugural edition of the OpenACS newsletter. The
response for my call-for-news by Email was quite fair, given the short
notice. So let us dig right in. In almost no particular order
our first entry comes from Collaboraid HQ, Copenhagen:
Lars Pind
Merge 4.6 to HEAD
Last week, we merged the oacs-4-6 tip back onto HEAD, after having
decided that we were too close to putting out a 5.0.0 release to make it
worthwhile to spend time on another release based on 4.6.
So from now on, all development should take place on HEAD. HEAD should
essentially be code freezed within a few weeks, and now already there's
a feature freeze. We need at least a beta-quality release out early
October. Joel will update with more release information later.
List builder
I've added a list builder, akin to the form builder, to the templating
system. See template::list::create and friends. It lets you build
dynamic tables and lists, and has a number of interested features,
though it still needs some work here and there.
Navigation and User Interface enhancements
I'm in the process of remaking some of the standard user interface.
The goal is to have the user experience for a groupware type application
be tolerable. In order to achieve that goal, I've started writing all
the UI that users will come across in that use case. It's mostly the
pages of acs-subsite that gets affected.
The work hasn't been completed, but we'll complete what we have time for
and roll back the rest in time for a 5.0.0 release.
Test-Driven Development
We've started doing test-driven development, so we'll write test-cases
for everything we can think of, before writing the code. And when we
find a bug, we try to remember to write a test-case that exploits the
bug first, then fix the bug and check that the test case now passes.
It feels very nice to develop in this fashion. It gives you a good way
to find out if some refactoring you made broke anything, and it lets you
easily test your API one proc at a time as you write it, instead of
having to wait until you have data model, complete API, and all of your
user-visible pages, before you can test anything.
Try it! I strongly recommend it.
Possibly somewhat surprising, at least to me, was the origin of the
next entry.
Joel Aufrecht
In an effort to bootstrap ourselves to representative government, the
team of CVS committers
ratified
the existing OpenACS Core Team as the
governing body for the OpenACS cvs tree and OpenACS.org until 25 Sep
2003. We are
discussing how to elections for a
seven-to-nine person OpenACS Core Team before that date. Key
unanswered questions include, who can vote and who will be on the
ballot. The Temporary OCT has
ratified
a process for
formal, transparent decision making.
5.0.0 Release Management
I'm heading release management for OpenACS 5.0.0. Current release
activities include Peter Marklund's excellent work setting up
automatic nightly builds on Collaboraid's public test server,
the 5.0.0
Milestone Criteria, the discussion
and TIP
on which packages to add and drop from the core
and application distributions. 5.0.0 is nearly code-complete; testing
is proceeding and release milestone dates will be announced when
known.
New features in 5.0.0 include
- internationalization: a single OpenACS site is
readable in any number of different languages; core packages
currently include full translations for Arabic, German, English,
Spanish, Italian, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese,
Portuguese, and Swedish.
- external authentication: OpenACS users can authenticate through external servers, such as with Unix account
passwords or LDAP or RADIUS.
- Noquote,
a security overhaul for the templating system which protects against
malicious HTML.
- Upgrades to calendar, photo-album, acs-subsite.
(Please email me if I'm missing
something!)
And in related news, I've moved to Copenhagen to work at
Collaboraid on OpenACS-based projects.
Jade Rubick
Project-manager
Project manager is a project management solution for OpenACS. It is
currently in active development, version 0.24d. I expect it to go alpha
by October 5th. After that period, unless other developers step in to
help, development may slow for two months while I finish porting my ACS
site to OpenACS. Unless anyone else steps in to help, I expect it to go
beta at the end of 2003. After that, development will pick up again.
Upgrade scripts should be available from the alpha on.
By October 5th, the project management system should be in a basic,
usable form. There will be plenty of room for improvements, and still a
few bugs, but no show-stoppers. I will be using it in production after
our Intranet is finished being ported to OpenACS.
Because this project is being funded by my employer, you can expect
rapid development on Project-management. My background is in Human
Computer Interaction, so I expect a lot of work on the scalability of
the interface.
Future plans include an SVG-based graph system (inspired by Tufte's
books on information presentation), with Gantt and PERT charts,
informational metrics on project and task status, easy manipulation of
hierarchies, resource smoothing, resource availability and scheduling.
I don't have any current plans to add in costs, budgets, or the like,
but this is open for other developers to add in.
Within a year, I'm expecting a slick interface, sophisticated,
informative project management, without a lot of the unnecessary frills
of other project management software. I'd like a 95% solution that does
that part of it well.
I'd welcome some help, especially after October 5th.
More information is available at:
https://openacs.org/projects/dotwrk/project_management/
Jade Rubick
Peter Marklund
I would like to add the OpenACS test servers, currently at URL
http://dotlrn.collaboraid.net/test/
as a news item. The plan is to move
the test page to test.openacs.org. It's just a static HTML page so we
could have it as an ETP page for example at openacs.org/test. The
automatic install scripts that we use for the test servers have been
checked in to CVS at openacs-4/etc/install. We are hoping for HTTP- and
Tcl API level tests to be contributed from OpenACS package developers
going forward.
Another news item is that Mohan Pakkurti is spearheading an Oracle 9i
compatibility effort for OpenACS for the 5.0 release.
Speaking of databases, then it might be worth mentioning that
PostgreSQL 7.3.4
is out.
A rare, but serious, startup failure was fixed. This upgrade is
critical for users of 7.3.3, and recommended for all other
versions.
Frank Nikolajsen
At the Copenhagen summit in April I volunteered to look into generating
a stand-alone boot CD of a demo installation of OpenACS based on
Knoppix. Some progress
has been made, enough so that I can say that this is technically
possible, but the hardware requirements for the demo machine will be
somewhat high. Even 256MB will quite possibly not be enough.
However currently the work on this project is more or less on
hold. I only have limited time available for OpenACS related work, and
I have decided that I need to concentrate on my own, core work for the
projects I would like to do. This newsletter is one of them.
There was some discussion on
IRC among some people, who
might want to take over the "Instant OpenACS" demo CD project.
Another pet project of mine is a new list of
OpenACS web
resources, which Dave Bauer suggested end up on
openacs.org at some point in time. I have plenty more links to add to
the list, something I intend to do in the near future before starting
on the next project, which is:
OpenACS documentation for new developers
I am considering starting to document my own efforts as a new
developer on OpenACS in the broadest sense. Basically I am hoping it
will be possible to get some of the experienced developers to review
the documentation and code I write with the intent of making my
projects (and thus my documentation effort) in full compliance with
current OpenACS recommended usage and coding guidelines (whatever
those are 😊. This will be the subject of a RFC from my hand in the
near future.
State Of The Codebase
Daily files commited/touched in HEAD by all committers:
2003-08-26 :: 21
2003-08-27 :: 21
2003-08-28 :: 122
2003-08-29 :: 872
2003-08-30 :: 66
2003-08-31 :: 13
2003-09-01 :: 9
2003-09-02 :: 26
2003-09-03 :: 36
2003-09-04 :: 70
2003-09-05 :: 121
2003-09-06 :: 88
2003-09-07 :: 3
2003-09-08 :: 0
We currently have 286
open
bugs and 121
open
patches.
NB: The CVS numbers seems to be low, I suspect I have not found the right
CVS option yet to get the correct history. 2003-08-29 was the day
most of the forward merge between oacs-4-6 and HEAD took place.
This concludes the newsletter for now. If you did not receive my
call-for-news Email this Sunday, but would like to be asked in the
future, then please drop me a line.
Frank.
PS: If you would like to know how I intended the newsletter to look before I realized HTML tables & friends were banned on the forums, then
have a look... 🤔
