Re: [Makumba-user] [Makumba-devel] Fwd: DANTE - Help me! questions about makumba

[Cristian B. <cr...@cs...>]

Manuel GAY wrote:
> because some people in BEST were having makumba parties, some makumba 
> developers went there, and thus the name.
> 
> not sure this is suitable for a thesis though :)
> 
> cristi, any more insights, regarding the first question also?

not much more, in 1999 when we started we had another name (metadata, 
known in athens summercourse 1999 as metafeta) but by the GA 2000 (i 
think) we thought that name is not best-specific-enough. i think it was 
a discussion between Igor Borojevic, Stefan Baebler and myself, not sure 
who else took part. Though I might confuse that discussion with the 
discussion where Igor (I think) baptised Karamba.

or it may be that they were "branded" at about the same time, which in 
retrospect looks like a smart move. at the time we had Minerva which was 
more or less done in makumba (but only the DB layer survived from that 
makumba version, the rest was some non-jsp templating, i think JHTML was 
involved, see below), PA which was in Lotus Notes and Johnny which was a 
java application with a "avant la lettre" JSP-like language that I and 
Ovidiu developed since 1996 (it was called JML, Sun's JHTML appeared 
after, based on a product called ATG Dynamo, and JSP appeared around 
2000 as a marketing response to ASP) and persisted its state as Java 
serialization. I imported data from all those in Makumba in a painful 
2001 summer (i had planned 2 days for it, it took 2 months).

so can you imagine that BEST committed to a makumba that was more or 
less just an idea, had no mak:list and not to mention mak:form in 2000? 
karamba design discussions (workshop and GM workgroups) were well under 
way already in 2000. Stefan stayed in Stockholm 6 months autumn/spring 
2000/2001 working on implementing both the makumba and the karamba 
concepts, as well as joining these karamba working groups. we also made 
the bundle then. i think after Stefan left came the idea of implementing 
makumba as a JSP taglib, so when i did the data import in the summer 
2001 i already had mak:list to look at it. i designed and implemented 
mak:form and BL in autumn 2001 in Ivrea at a summerschool. finally we 
had a complete makumba. i don't know when we switched to tomcat, i guess 
ever since we worked with jsp. before that, there was something called 
Java Web Server and it was the reference implementation for JHTML.

then ITC started the implementation of PA TS, Minerva TS and Johnny TS 
(= transitional system, i.e. a makumba clone of the original). parade 
was developed quite fast in early 2002 and launched during a ITC meeting 
(Risto called it paralyzed development). i think Johnny TS (which was 
crucial for the success of the whole mak+karamba enterprise) was put in 
production in summer 2002, Raul started it and went home, then it turned 
out that there had been an outofmemory exception when running the import 
that i had developed already a year before, so lots of people and their 
applications were missing. we did a re-import and a handful of 
applications (entered before we realized that the import was wrong) were 
lost, but overall it was ok. just in time because johnny had not been 
designed to be multi-season and it was caching all its data, so we talk 
1 Gb RAM (there were no Java weak references at the time) and 1-2 hours 
to start up. i don't remember when PA-TS and Minerva TS were launched. 
then there was one project left, the account merging, that took much 
longer to complete.

if you want to find out the precise "makumba" moment and circumstances, 
maybe ask the above people, and Toto. see also the list of initial 
makumba meetings
http://www.makumba.org/makumba.html
... so the makumba.org domain name was bought in summer/autumn 2000 but 
the package name remained metadata until late 2000. if i look at that 
document now it seems that we were in the confused design space 
exploration that lasted quite long (over 2 years!) before the mak:list 
and mak:form breakthroughs were made.

cristi