Testing filesystem version of the MidCOM

Thu 4th November 2004 18:47 EET

Today I had the privilege to try out the brand new filesystem version of the MidCOM component architecture. This rather unusual Midgard development direction was proposed by Torben Nehmer, the main architect of MidCOM, and voted for by the other developers. The main logic is to separate system code totally from the content, which still resides in the Midgard DB.

I used Nemein's old development server as the test base. Torben has put up short instructions for testing, which I found quite easy to follow. With the instructions I had the test site running in just 10 minutes. Another 10 minutes and I had the AIS in front of me, missing only HTMLArea, that is still to be imported to the filesystem version.

One thing that we are really looking forward to seeing, is the increase in performance - that is the number one problem with the current MidCOM. With today's short testing I really cannot tell whether the site is faster than the MidCOM sites are now. We were planning on running Siege against similar sites, but are still missing proper testbase (content that is).

All in all, I can say that the current version seems to work very well already and was easy to install. However, there's still much work to do in integrating all the components as for now there's only one component available in FS-MidCOM. The next steps in my testing agenda are as follows:

  1. Make the FS-MidCOM run with the MidCOM Template (there are still few bugs lying around after 30 minutes of testing)
  2. Integrate HTMLArea 3.0-rc1 with into FS-MidCOM
  3. Learn how to convert components to FS-MidCOM