As every year, we spend our Easter holiday in the North. A group of my former colleagues from Enschede (The Netherlands) convene in the Ardennes for Easter every year and we gladly join them. It's a great opportunity to catch up on what everyone is up to in this busy world. The past 12 months saw the arrival of 3 babies in the group, so you can guess there was quite a bit of baby talk. Luckily the babies played along and didn't make life too difficult for us grown ups. After all, we came to eat/drink/chat with each other for a whole weekend.
The ensuing 2 weeks we spent in my native Holland. First in The Hague, our regular hide-out, and the second week in seclusion in Zeeland (South-West, the delta part). I took the opportunity to meet up with a couple of DNN core team members: Leigh Pointer and Erik van Ballegoij. We had lunch in Haarlem and discussed various DNN issues relating to country communities and localization. Let’s hope we'll make progress on these soon (you can read more about my beef in older posts on this blog). Because I have quite a few customers in Holland, I usually take the opportunity to drop by a couple when I’m there. This time was no exception. There were interesting projects under development as well so my time was well spent …
The second week we stayed in Zeeland, as I mentioned earlier. It is a beautiful part of the country if you can appreciate its flatness. This is where 2 of the continents most important rivers (Rhine and Meuse) end up in the sea and the result is a mish mash of land and water. To keep their feet dry, the land is surrounded by dikes (on the river sides) and dunes (on the sea facing sides). After a disastrous flood in 1953 the Dutch set upon fixing this part of the planet once and for all. The ensuing ‘delta works’ are among the most outstanding engineering feats in the world and well worth a visit. I tried to explain to my daughter (now 4) what a flood is and why the dunes and dikes are important (and why you should not pull out the plants for instance). After a week I think she grasped the concept of ‘when the water came over the land and the animals were killed’. The details will come in future visits I imagine.
Needless to say, most work on DMX 4 during this time was mental, rather than hard coding. I’ve made one more (and I hope last) change to the data layer and I’ve rewired that all the way to the UI. Technically the bare bones are done, now it’s time to flesh it out and hang in the extras. And there is a long list of those. So many customers, so many wishes. I’m very happy with the elegance of the new data model, though. Most many-to-many relations are now neatly resolved in link tables and some new additions will really enhance the feature packet. One thing I’ve stalled on is the migration of the keywords field to a proper tagging engine. I’ve had discussions with the core team about a generic tagging engine and Nik Kalyani told us (it was a conference call with some other developers) that he had a solution ready to integrate. Keen to not reinvent the wheel I asked for a status and timeline. Despite repeated emails about this, I can’t get an answer from him on this. So DMX 4 will use the old keywords field and the new tagging engine will have to wait a bit longer.
On the positive side, I’ve managed to align some internal projects to piggyback with DMX 4. One project focuses on providing some kind of Windows based synchronization client so that a user ca synchronize a folder on his/her harddisk with a collection in DMX. The other project will look at offering a signing service option to DMX. This means: put a document online and someone else can digitally sing it. The customer is a top certification authority and they would provide the signing as a web service. All this means that May will (in all likeliness) be completely devoted to DMX 4 development. The target being that at the end of May there should be a working version ready for field testing. At the beginning of June I might travel to Holland for a conference and when I return I want to have 100% effort in fixing, wrapping, and moving to distribution. Ideally this should coincide with the launch of a store on my own site, but I know that these kinds of wishes don’t always become reality …
Now for some sleep.