[Setools] Gjallar status report

[goran at krampe.se]

Hi folks!

Its hectic here, we are working hard on getting 0.2 into shape and I
wanted to tell a bit about what we are doing.

My plan is to get a new 0.2 release out around friday, or if we miss
that - monday at the latest.

Gjallar is currently running in "parallell test deployment" for a few
users with a very simple Process. But there are more groups itching to
get started.

The current verdict is that it seems quite stable, is a bit sluggish
when you login (creating Seaside components and caching objects into the
session etc) but gets snappier when you have clicked around a bit. There
are a few known smaller issues but apart from that it looks pretty good.

The Win32 VM blows up on us now and then - but typically when debugging
low level somewhere - not easy to isolate why. Magnus added a nice
javascript datepicker. The Scheduler has been enhanced, especially the
various services it is running. The LDAP mirroring of user accounts
works great.

The email popping and sending works good including attachment detection
etc.

One of the more important low level bits I have been working on is to
ensure that the Q2Txn pattern works as it is meant to do. The
initialize/bootstrap of Gjallar has now been fully txnized so that we
can actually spool out all txns on a single file, initialize Gjallar -
and then read them back and reapply them. This now works and is
important for two reasons:

1. The offline operation depends on it of course. And we want to get
that working ASAP.

2. The Txn hierarchy is much less prone to changes which means that this
offers a great easy way to migrate an older db to a new version. Just
write out all txns, reinitialize with new code, read them back in.

One thing I will be looking at soon is to migrate 13000 old cases into
Gjallar. This will of course show us a bunch of places where we need to
take greater care with Magma collections and indexing etc. We are aware
of several "cheats" in the code that will not scale that good.

And I am also going to fix some glaring UI issues. :)

regards, Göran