Project Ragnaroek - The Road towards Midgard 2

Note: this document is still in proposal stage. Definite decisions on the roadmap towards Midgard 2 have not yet been made.

Updates:

Project Ragnaroek

There have been several attempts at rewriting Midgard in the past, most notably the separate Midgard 2 development projects lead by Jukka Zitting (2000) and Ami Ganguli (2001). However, these attempts have not been able to produce results.

Important point here is that rewrites are very difficult for Open Source projects. Volunteer contributions usually rely on the fact that contributors can receive something immediately usable from their efforts. Because of this it is important to implement Project Ragnarok on existing infrastructure, minimizing effort needed for producing results.

What is Ragnaroek?

Ragnaroek (Ragnarøk) is the final battle between gods and giants in Nordic mythology. After the final battle a new world will be built on the ruins.

What is Midgard?

The first part in planning a rewrite of Midgard's architecture is to understand what Midgard actually is. In the discussions so far the following has appeared:

Goals

There are several important goals for the Midgard rewrite:

Important considerations

Midgard has several important aspects that should be retained in the rewrite:

Proposed solution

Proposed Midgard 2 architecture

Idea discussed by Henri Bergius, Torben Nehmer and David Schmitter in OSCOM Sprint Zurich was to base the new Midgard 2 on top of an existing application server. Ideas presented included Zope and JBOSS.

In this case the application server would provide data management services. Midgard API would be provided by a PHP-level library, preferably available from PEAR. The library would communicate with the application server using a RPC protocol like SOAP or XML-RPC. HTTP query handling would be managed by a lightweight Apache 2 module.

Using an existing application server would simplify development, as it would be only required to write the needed Midgard object classes for that application server. Also, since all data would be managed by the application server the PHP library could be relatively lightweight. Using an Apache module instead of mod_rewrite like Midgard Lite does would allow greater flexibility and keep the Midgard name in Apache response headers. Preferably Midgard 2 would be also runnable without the Apache module.