It is interesting how quickly things can change.

For some time now Naji, Mark and I have all agreed that AgileWiki5 would need to be written in Scala--it is looking very much like a great language and provides a lot of things that will make AgileWiki code easier to understand and maintain. But it really looked like we could not possibly start work on it until August 2010 at the earliest.

About 2 weeks ago I told Naji that I was now ready to do a rewrite, as I finally figured out a way to do versioning much more efficiently. The key was to separate the logical structure of a Rolon from the physical structure, with a kernel handling all the mapping of logical addresses to disk offsets.

Now I've been very busy refactoring the code which generates the HTML, first to move a lot of the logic out of the JSPs and to rework queries to respond in fixed-time. And then more refactoring to eliminate the JSPs, as they could not be used to generate web content passed via cometd. But the resulting code was completely hostile to web developers. Mark pointed me to a web site which was using the Lift Framework (which is written in Scala) to generate web content for cometd messages. Wow! Lift makes JSP look like roadside kill.

I then had another conceptual breakthrough and again the key was the separation of the logical and physical structures of a Rolon, as this allowed for the implementation of a kernel. The user-level code could be fully multi-threaded, with the kernel tracking which blocks were accessed/updated by which user processes and through the use of opportunistic transactions. Rewrite fever had struck home! So I spent a day looking at Scala and then I could not sleep at all for two nights--I had discovered the Scala Cake Pattern, which is a great way to implement the elements of a Rolon and which will make all our code ever so much simpler and easier to understand. Now I was really torn. To start rewriting AgileWiki right now was simply not realistic.

Finally a chat with Naji, who was visiting our client. They were impressed with a demo of the desktop, reduced the demo requirements for the end of the year significantly, pushed the demo to their clients off from the end of the year to April of next year, and pushed the deadline for a product from August 2010 to April 2011. Naji and I concurred--it is time to start AgileWiki5!

Tonight I learned that Barrie knows Scala, so we have at least one developer familiar with the language. And he'll be working up the Maven pom files for AgileWiki5.

The role of the AgileWiki Community is:

• to help developers understand and use the AgileWiki;
• to further the development of AgileWiki; and
• to build a team that can provide future support.

Meeting Room: AgileWikiDevelopers

• SmtpCodeReview 26 January 2009
• PeerArkProxyCodeReview 27 January 2009
• Relations
  • Relations1 1 February 2009 Intro to Relations
  • Relations2 2 February 2009 Review of - Relations API in Root
  • Relations3 4 February 2009 Review of RelationRoot