Yesterday we (me nad Piotras) spent almost whole day to get there. Unfortunately, even travelling by plane you need a lot of time to get there. In the evening we had a lovely time at Smallone's tasting delicoius TexMex food prepared by Eva.

Today we followed the agenda guys have written and so far we managed to accept the design for a new Midgard Schema feature - views. From now on, views will be implemented and managed by Midgard core. All you will have to do is add a MgdSchema definition like

<view name="groups_with_coord">
  <property name="guid" from="midgard_group:guid" />
  <property name="official" from "midgard_group:official" />
  <property name="lat" from="org_routa_positiononing_location:lat" />

  <join direction="left" left="midgard_group:guid" right="org_routa_positiononing_location:parentguid" />
  <join direction="inner" left="midgard_group:id" right="midgard_member:gid" />

  <where property="midgard_group:owner" constraint=">" value="0" />
</view>

And this will make MgdSchema to create an object that you will use like regular schema object:

<?php

$qb = new midgard_query_builder("groups_with_coord");
$qb->add_constraint("official","=","My Group");
$rst = $qb->execute();

?>

We also decided about Midgard 9.09 codename which is now "Mjolnir". Mjolnir is Thor's holy hammer, so next Midgard release is expected to be smashing.

Before lunch we had a group photo:

More photos are in my photo stream.

During first day we also started discussion on what next with MultiLang. The major issue is that current ML implementation limits to some content areas while more often there is a need to use ML'ed metatada and other stuff. Basic new concept presented by Piotras assumes that we have multiple records for each language for each object. This way, basing on given GUID and language contect we are able to fetch desired object from database.

This started a long, storming disussion because of linkink objects problem, multiple indexes and getting rid of local IDs.

In the evening we had some Chinese food and went to bar for some entertainment.

Today we discuessed two more items from agenda: UI changes and Datamanager refactoring. First was about adopting Bespin and/or Ubiquity features to make UI and Admin UI more human language oriented. As it was expected, another hot discussion raised because of different approaches to UI matter presente by many attendees. I prefer approach that we don't surprise end users with nifty gadgets that they are not prepared for. End users tend to expect from web application similar functionality and visual presence as they get from their OS. Besides, no matter how innovative both are, they seem to be limited to Mozilla/Firefox. Anyway we agreed that it may be a worth watching and thinking while both projects get into mature state so that we are not left behind.

Second subject was pretty easy, we all love&hate Datamanager same time. While it facilitates form and data operations, it is also limited by desgin and sometimes brings problems. The main ideas is to refactor DM to rely only on MgdSchema objects and let developer decide what to do with particular fields during runtime. Talking about DM relation to MdgSchema we couldn't miss MgdSchema inheritance which is basically about extending f.ex. midgard_article with solt_article object and benefit directly from midgard_article features and be able to add some more specific functionality designed by developer.

Somewhere around noon most of Finish team had to leave for a ferry back to Finland. We left only four of us: Smallone, Bergie, Piotras and myslef. I took the chance to bug Bergie about running MidCOM 3 aka Midgard MVC on Ragnaroek and started porting this site to Midgard MVC platform.

And of course, yo ucan find some more photos here.

Well... what was wrong with first approach? The approach itself. Most likely due to some knowledge issues, I made a fundamental mistake by trying to build it in VS. That was wrong.

All dependencies I have (Glib, DBus, GDA, XML, whatever) are built under MinGW so clear should be to build Vinland under MinGW too, but apparently it was clear enough for me.

Last night, just as arrived back home after Midgard Gathering, I took my wife's laptop and after some 3 hours of completinh MinGW installations along with Vinland dependencies I got first running libmidgard2 library with midgard-schema.exe and midgard-query.exe fully operational. No unresolved symbols, no broken references, no crashes at all. However I faced some issues with database creation, I blame the laptop running on Vista (yuk!) so today I started porting it again on my box under XP.

Be sure, that as soon as I get it done, I will post binaries and developers instructions :)