Weekly Status Report: 15 Feb 2002

Wow, we actually did this two weeks in a row :-) At any rate, here's a little run down of what's been going on this week in Turbine.

New Committers

James Taylor was added as a new committer this week. James has been working on the Pipeline, has added some JGenerator renderers which is very cool, and is generally helping out all over the place. Welcome James!

Integration of the decoupled Torque in the TDK

Martin has the decoupled Torque working with Turbine 2.x so he is now working on integrating this work into the TDK. We are going to officially deprecate the use of the coupled Torque, and when we refer to Torque from now on we mean the decoupled Torque. The Torque that exists in the 2.x tree is now officially road kill.

New Torque Tutorial!

Pete Kazmier has written an excellent Torque Tutorial which is now available here. This will certainly help a lot of users who have had some initial difficulty in getting Torque set up and running. Thanks Pete!

Turbine Project Build System

Jason has been working on a build system that can be used by all Turbine projects. The goal is to have a single build.xml file that can be used by all the builds. This is an effort to try and simplify the maintenance overhead in all our projects now that we have decoupled everything. We are going to move toward builds for each component in Stratum and builds for each service in Fulcrum.

Security Model

There has been a lot of discussion on the turbine-dev list about the new security model for Turbine 3. Most recent conversations have focused on what examples from JAAS could be applied to Turbine Security. Check this thread in the mail archive to see the details.

There was also some discussion about an LDAP implementation for Turbine 2. See this thread for details. If that work gets completed, we will find a way to include it in the Turbine 3 security model.

RunData Reworking

The testbed is now working again in the rundata_security_changes branch again. I'm not entirely happy with how it works yet but it's getting there. Right now you can use a subclass of RunData but classes the employ the use of this subclass must upcast in order to reach the functionality within the subclass. I borrowed this method directly from Jetspeed, but I would like to make something cleaner. I've got some ideas and I'll post about them in next weeks status report.

Conversion of JCS logging to Commons Logging

Using JCS as a test ground, James has implemented the use of the Commons Logging package. We will still use log4j as our standard back end logging mechanism but people who have chosen to use LogKit or Java 1.4 logging then they will easily be able to do so.

JCS Documentation

Pete Kazmier started another great documentation effort by reworking the current JCS documentation into our standard xdoc format. This will definitely help people understand what a kick ass cache JCS really is :-)