Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Five years ago I introduced WebGUI Runtime Environment (WRE) 0.3 to the world. Back then it was basically just the prereqs you needed to run WebGUI. Since then it's matured into the defacto way you install and manage WebGUI. Instead of taking a day to install all the prereqs for WebGUI, you can have them installed in less than 10 minutes. And instead of taking half an hour to set up a new site (copying configs, files, databases, etc) you can just run the addsite.pl command and have your new site ready in seconds. All in all it's turned into a very useful tool.
This week we'll be releasing WRE 0.9, which is basically just an update of 0.8. There really aren't any new features, it's just brand new versions of all the prereqs. Apache has been updated to 2.2, Perl is 5.10, and MySQL is 5.1. Plus all the modules and smaller prereqs have been updated as well. These new versions should provide a bit more reliability and also a small performance boost due to some improvements in Apache and Perl.
The 0.9 WRE isn't the big news though. WRE 1.0 is. In order to call it 1.0 it needs two things: differential backups and 64-bit compliance. Between now and the 2009 WUC we'll be hard at work to provide these two things, so that we can finally have a 1.0 WRE.
The differential backups will be provided by replacing lftp in the backup system with rsync. You'll still be able to use lftp if you want, but rsync will be the primary mode of backup.
Though differential backups will be great, the big news will certainly be a WRE that compiles cleanly on 64-bit operating systems. A couple of us have been tinkering on this to try to make it work for almost a year now. However, serious effort hasn't been put into it until recently. Part of the difficulty stems from some of our prereqs not being updated to work on 64-bit nicely until recently. And the rest is due to all the operating system and architecture specific compile flags that have to be issued to get things to compile nicely. However, it should be well worth the wait. Your WebGUI processes will be able to address more memory, and should be more efficient at handling memory and rapid throughput.
I'm excited to see the light at the end of the tunnel for a WRE 1.0 release. It's been a long time in the making.
Looking to 1.1 and beyond, we'll see a new WRE for the release of WebGUI 8. Our goals for WRE beyond 1.0 are primarily focused around performance and clustering. The goal will be to make it as easy to set up a clustered instance of WebGUI as the WRE made setting up a single server instance of WebGUI.
Other smaller tasks will be to have better integration with SSL certificate management and generation; To provide better configuration options for the WRE tools so they can be used in native package distributions of WebGUI; And to enhance both the command line and graphical interfaces of the WRE so that the users of each have more power and convenience at their fingertips.
The future of the WRE remains strong and bright. And the next chapter starts this week with WRE 0.9, so be on the lookout for it.
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User:
koen
Date: 5/26/2009 2:49 am |
Rating: 4
Rate [
Status: Archived |
I would like to do a WRE feature discussion on IRC one of these days to see what are the features that people would like the most into the WRE.
I would also like to suggest a release schema similar to the WebGUI release one:
I would really love to spend more time on WRE and have people love the WRE more by having a more stable WRE.
Perhaps we could have a WRE 1.x which is the stable to go with WebGUI 7.7 and then start development on WRE 8.0 which could go with WebGUI 8.0 to have a clearer versioning scheme and to express the couple between WRE and WebGUI?
Koen de Jonge - ProcoliX
http://www.procolix.com
Hosting - WebGUI - Virtualization
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User:
arjan
Date: 5/26/2009 3:41 am |
Rating: 20
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Status: Archived |
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User:
perlDreamer
Date: 5/26/2009 11:26 am |
Rating: 4
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Status: Archived |
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User:
knowmad
Date: 5/26/2009 12:41 pm |
Rating: 3
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Status: Archived |
> My first idea: tools to check the quality of your website, validators
> and a like in your IDE/WRE. That's something I'm going to have a look at
> anyway.
I like it! In fact, I wrote a prototype workflow to validate a page using W3C's API. I have a few ideas for the WRE as well including support for mod_bw and mod_security.
William
----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com
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User:
JT
Date: 5/26/2009 9:01 am |
Rating: 4
Rate [
Status: Archived |
Couldn't you have that any old day you were logged in? Or are you saying we should have a scheduled discussion that takes place on a specific day during a specific 1 hour period?I would like to do a WRE feature discussion on IRC one of these days to see what are the features that people would like the most into the WRE.
I would also like to suggest a release schema similar to the WebGUI release one:
- WRE Stable, to go with the stable WebGUI which has few upgrades all together.
- WRE Beta, to go with the beta WebGUI to which new features and modules can be added all the time. This WRE goes into feature freeze together with WebGUI.
- WRE Experimental, which is focussed at the beta WebGUI, but allows us to experiment with things like other software for proxy servers, other SQL servers. Basically a WRE for developers.
I would really love to spend more time on WRE and have people love the WRE more by having a more stable WRE.
Perhaps we could have a WRE 1.x which is the stable to go with WebGUI 7.7 and then start development on WRE 8.0 which could go with WebGUI 8.0 to have a clearer versioning scheme and to express the couple between WRE and WebGUI?
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User:
koen
Date: 5/26/2009 9:06 am |
Rating: -3
Rate [
Status: Archived |
Unless you're saying that ProcoliX is going to dedicate serious time to the WRE effort on an ongoing basis, I don't think we can do this.
ProcoliX is going to dedicate serious time to the WRE effort on an ongoing basis.
Koen de Jonge - ProcoliX
http://www.procolix.com
Hosting - WebGUI - Virtualization
