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I downloaded the first 1.1 alpha when it came out and did some testing, modified some components etc that I have been developing -- all hunky dory and I've been waiting for alpha2 and beta.

I now look at the trunk in SVN and find a very different beast - I mean its not just bug fixes but almost a completely different application:

• A completely new database interface mechanism
• Hundreds of files moved around and renamed
• A completely new frontend language system (more like what I thought was going to be in 1.2)

To name but a few!

When does the functionality/structure stop changing so that 3party developers etc. have something reasonably static to experiment with?

Geraint

For the most part, the structure is not going to change much more for version 1.1 unless something big comes up.

That being said, it goes into feature freeze when it goes beta... and we aren't at beta yet. 

pretty neat changes, don't you think?

Louis

Some changes I like but I am not at all certain about the DB driver approach.  Implementing multi-lingual Fish type capabilities is now far more complicated than is needed and may severely limit its functionality!  The old 4.5.3CVS approach via adodb was neat and was compatible with a fish type database interceptor.

Geraint

hmm... i haven't really looked at the db work as i've been knee deep in the filesystem stuff among other things.  But i was under the impression that the direction the db drivers were going was to emulate the necessary functionality of adodb without all the overhead.

Louis

Geraint,

I agree with you...the community is getting a little restless about this.

We really need to make sure we have a feature lock ASAP.  To say that "That being said, it goes into feature freeze when it goes beta... and we aren't at beta yet," does not strike much confidence in the project for businesses and 3PDs trying to move on.

Geraint, are you being serious when you say "Hundreds of files moved around and renamed" since the first alpha release?  If so, Rey, I think you're leading S&G Team, right?  Can you comment on this?

-Ryan

Rey hasn't been here on the forum for quite a while now, I know he has been busy doing two jobs: Last Active:  09-11-2005, 09:24:46

Tonie,

Wow, Rey's not involved in 1.1?  That says a lot!  I know that I had conversations with him about versioning, upgrades, etc, and he said the S&G team was committed to locking down feature sets and getting versions out the door in a professional manner.  I've already seen this being done, but it would be great to see if someone on the core dev team is sitting in a project management capacity.  I'm sure there is, I'm just not knowledgeable of it.

Rey is an awesome member of the team....looking forward to getting him back here sometime.

Best,
Ryan

I totally agree with you there, hopefully he will be back in full force once things are back to normal. Joomla 1.1 is getting beautiful by the looks of it, but some scope creep has indeed settled in. Lots and lots of work has already been done that is going to be really helpful for the coming versions.

Oke guys, I try to hammer down your questions one by one.

1. Who is doing what ?

Since the start of the 1.1 development cycle I have taken over development team lead and development coordination from Andrew. Andrew is currenlty investing most of his available time in the overall project management. Rey on the other hand is our Stability team leader his main task is the coordination of the stability releases.

The Standards and Guidelines (S&G) working group is coordinated by Marko and it's main task is to involve 3P developers in the development process and documentation process. If u take a look at the changelog u will get a good idea of who is doing what on 1.1 at the moment.

2. Structure changes

There is no way around the fact that the API's in 1.0.x are a mess and i'll be the first to admit that. The system is bascially one big piece of hacked together code. Most of the API's are badly written, not flexible and not always using proper OO principles. These problems have been discussed time and time again in the past. Everyone agreed that something needed to be done about it.

In the past these changes have always been put on the long run since they would be coming in a 5.0 version. A version that was started multiple times but never got out of the cvs. The commitment that Joomla! 2.0 will be built on PHP5 made clear that something needed to be done on the 1.x codebase. We just couldn't leave it as is, this would make the implementation fo the planned features in 1.2/1.3... very hard and the life of a 3P developer a living hell.

The development cycle of 1.1 was the ideal time to do something about this. We have used the time it took to properly research the UTF-8 issues to refactor the codebase. We based ourselves on the feedback gathered over the last year and the experiences from developing 4.5.3. As a result the system has been restructured and the API have been cleaned up.

3. Development cycle

Now ... before u start panicing (I know u will ), let me reassure u, it might seem an impossible amount of changes but we are confident that the system still works with 90% of backwards compatibility. (as any minor release will break som things). We realise that we have some scope creep, we just hope u can see past this.

The release of 1.1 alpha2 means that we will be feature complete. (we are almost there). After this release we are committing ourselves to the following :

• 1. We will make sure that the whole API is documented (work on this has already started)
• 2. We will make sure that backwards compatibility problems are either solved or documented
• 3. We introduce new developer resources to facilitate 3P developers (developer blog and wiki)
• 4. We are planning (bi)-weekly developer IRC meetings to give 3 developer a chance to ask questions, give feedback about the changes

4. Goal

The end goal for 1.1 is to present a flexible and powerfull core framework that is fully documented and sets a new standards for all future Joomla! development.  We are very excited about the work done in the past 8 weeks and we hope u guys will feel the same once u have looked at bit deeper.

Johan,

Wow, I don't know where to start.  How about this: your post was one of the most insightful posts i've ever seen developed by this dev team.

Thank you for your insight, dedication, and hard work.  I don't think the community knew that you had taken over as lead developer on the project, and I think things like this are items that should be shared more openly with the community.  It doesn't need to be a big post, just something giving us a little idea of what's happening behind the scenes.

You've packed so much into this post, I'll need to print it out and read through it a few times.  Anything that moves us towards cleaner code and more OO based code is a huge positive in my book.  I don't think anyone knew the team was going to tackle these items in 1.1!

Ok, back to a reread...

Oh, twice a month core team and 3PD IRC meetings gets a HUGE approval from me!

Best,
Ryan

Johan, this was a VERY interesting read, and would,with just a few more details, make a great article for the news/frontpage. That would allow everybody to get the info and avoid it being lost in the depths of the forums..

Edit: I see Ryan is as excited about all this info as I am and also believes it's contents need to be spread wider.

Heck yeah!  Man, this is a breath of fresh air!  I can go on my one week vacation knowing that Joomla is in amazing hands, and our clients will know where it's heading. =)

Further dissemination might be nice, but I'm sure there's also a push-back to not overwhelm the non-developers...but, might be good to slap something like this up on the homepage of Joomla.

-Ryan

Raises his hand in favor of putting this on the news section/announcements.

I do recommend for everybody who is interested to download the changelog of the alpha version (I can send it if people want). The changelog changes daily, and everybody is working really hard on the new version.

Johan

The purpose of my post was not to complain about the changes - more to express some surprise at the extent of the changes between 1.1alpha and the current SVN.  I am a developer on a couple components (fish and events) and had done enough work in alpha to get proofs of concept working and was somewhat surprised by how much reworking was needed to get them to work with the latest trunk mainly because of the database driver changes (which I've now done)

The question was a genuine one - is there an estimate of when the development freeze will kick in so that developers like myself can plan ahead.

thanks for all the good work

Geraint

p.s. Maybe the natural place for the explanatory content of your message is alongside the roadmap?

This was not a goal in that way for the 1.1 but during the developing it becomes a necessity and the best time to do it was now and not step by step in 1.2 or 1.3 as planned and cause the current delay.

The S&G Team is currently heavy on documenting the changes from the view of a 3PD on a seperated wiki ( which will be shortly open for all interested 3PD'S ) , which functions becomes deprecated and of course their replacement function, so the 3PD's know for further Versions of their own addons how to use them.

Deprecated function are still available in a legacy file to keep the backward compatiblity. 

Also which new features are added and how to use and what they did, some small works are posted as draft in the S&G Forum.

Marko,

Just piling on the eye-opening posts today, eh? =)

This is great insight.  I really think that a twice monthly IRC session with the core devs would really be a great way to keep us 3PDs happy and informed enough.  To be honest (and this might be a foul) but since I don't deal with the developing trunk code, I have our firm focusing our efforts on client services and add-ons, so I don't have/get the time to read the changelogs.  A short 30 minute IRC session or developer blogs would really make my life easier.

I have a feeling there are others here in similar positions.  I'm excited to dive into all the new features and code.

Best,
Ryan

A few words on the language and internationalization work.



I think that the language related functionality in 1.1 can better be described as "Internationalization" rather than multi-lingual switching ala "Fish".

Internationalization of the back-end has been a high priority request from the community. The functionality is to set one language (default or user preferred) - This relates to interface only and has no limit on functionality. It turns out that the ini parsing is even faster than the native php parsing. Therefore changing the front end languages to ini files only improves things.

The most significant part of the internationalization process (in terms of user value) is the move to utf-8. Joomla will be a leader of the pack with the implementation of utf-8. It has been implemented in such a way that backward (and safe) compatibility is kept in respect to older versions of MySQL and it will not even enforce installing the native utf-8 support in php (which is an optional module and not present in 100% of hosts).

I second, third and fourth putting this up as a news item.  At the very least, an addition of "What's happening in 1.1" with a link to this thread *should* be placed on the roadmap. Cleaning up the code, using proper OO principles - these are things that many, many people need to know about, not just the 3PD's.  This is a brilliant move and one that I feel everyone will welcome. Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I sure welcome it! 

Hi all,

The message has come across very loudly ! Thanks for all the support.

As for the announcement, we were already planning to create a article about the progress of 1.1. I just hadn't come around putting things on paper. Working 8/10 hours daily on the code, plus all the extra management tasks that need attention haven't allowed me to get to it.

It seems that what I wrote has been very well received. I will clean it up and pass this information to the PI team for publishing on the main site. If there are any other areas that u want to see touched let me know and i'll try to add some info about them.

Johan

In my opinion Joomla is in very good hands with you guys at the wheel   But i miss Jinx and Marko at mambosolutions.com ( shameless plug )
of course though i am much happier that they spend their time making Joomla as awesome as possible.

Great news guys and congrats!

p.s. feature freeue sounds like a good idea, but i am too far ourt of the know to make any stong opinions on that. i leave it to the profis

JB

Thanks, this is news that is really important to people who spend a lot of time in and around Joomla.

Please change the roadmap with the announcement. Set the date Joomla 1.0.4 saw the light, add 1.0.5 as TBA, and change the date of Joomla 1.1 to TBA or Q1 2006 accordingly. There have been quite a lot of questions about this lately, and not all people follow the forums like I do .

That is what beta releases are all about. Alpha is proof-of-concept, and nothing more. Please, please do not plan any major product announcements or strategic decisions based on alpha releases.

Trust me on this, I've been burned by this on many occasions...

*spacemonkey rubs sore backside

I agree - multi-lingual content management and internationalisation are two distinct 'features'.  Language switching of database content in the frontend is an essential feature of many implementations of Joomla/Mambo and is a quite distinct requirement from the mechanics of setting and retrieving the interface in the chosen language.  Users want the content in their own language as well as the standardised interface text handled by the ini files and most webmasters will want the ability to switch this on the fly (and quite unrelated to browser or OS locale) as well as setting a "site language".



I agree that, for many, utf-8 is an essential feature  .  [as a complete aside, on one occasion when I tried to move an existing installation of Joomla between machines I used the MySQL admin backup and restore feature but this failed because it had assumed utf-8 as a character set but some of the indexes in 3rd part components were then too long!].

Back to the plot ...

When I started looking in detail as 1.1SVN a few days ago I was thrown by the database driver changes and couldn't think of a sensible way of layering fish type functionality into the new JDatabase descendant classes.  I have now identified a neat, manageable solution so my panic is over  .

Wow - thanks for the heads-up on this thread. So excited that these changes are on the plate for 1.1 - fantastic! Hopefully these changes will be made available a week or two before the stable version is released to assess existing CMT's compatibility.

Cheers to everyone involved - sounds great!

Lesson (has it been learned is the question?)

the community wants better communication. don't keep an oudated and obviously off roadmap. it needs to be a current roadmap or it is useless.

community--root word commune
communication--root word commune

the two go together.

hope to have better communication...
nathan.

Updated today: http://www.joomla.org/content/view/14/28/

I hate to be picky but the roadmap is very important to developers. I think that this text should be more detailed to avert any misunderstandings:
[quote="Roadmap 1.1 info"]Overhaul of underlying framework for future flexibility and scalability[/quote]
Perhaps a simple link to Jinx's post in this thread would be good enough but something more specific should be mentioned about these major changes to the API if possible.

Sorry to be so picky....thanks for your work.

In fairness, the roadmap should be important to developers, but provide lots of details on it regarding things that change day to day (like the api in an alpha stage) is somewhat unreasonable in my opinion.  The SVN tree is there for everyone to see, and commits are nearly always commented with brief comments on teh changes as well as a relatively well documented changelog.  So if a developer is trying to stay on top of constant changes in the codebase, it would be in his/her best interest to go right to the source.  That being said, once beta has been declared and the API is solid, then an update with an outline of specific changes makes more sense.  Also, even if you don't want to checkout a copy of the code, there is always the web interface to the source tree on developer.joomla.org which can be viewed at any time. 

Documentation is coming, but it will be presented when we get to a point where the API is stable.

Louis

I intend to translate the article I wrote from those posts ( http://www.joomla.fr/Information_Joomla ... futur.html for the french version) back into english with a few more details from other posts by Predator and Louis, upon Johans request, hopefully tomorrow (but don't take my word for it..) ..

Thanks Joe, looking forward to that. PM me when u have it done.