GEAS status update

[Reinhard Mueller]

Things are moving forward :-)

Module separation
-----------------

We have finally made it and cleaned up modularity in GEAS.

GEAS currently consists of 5 core modules
* configuration
* datamonitor
* oql
* objectstore
* objectcache
* methods

These modules are now quite well seperated and the dependencies are 
clear and well-documented in the file geas/doc/dia/dependencies.dia.

All these 5 modules depend on GLib, and we are commited to using GLib 
wherever possible and sensible.

Dependencies on ORBit are nearly all removed from these core modules. We 
want the complete core of GEAS to become independent of ORBit, which 
will enable us to switch to another means of transport for systems where 
ORBit is not available (rumours say that Windows is such a system).

The next step will be to go through the code, reformat it according to 
our standards, and fix our short-term problems like 64 bit int and 
boolean data type.

Apart from these 5 core modules we have the gcd parser code, which is 
being heavily improved by Neil currently.

Now, having all this stuff separated out, we are able to assign 
volunteers to parts of GEAS. You neither need knowledge about CORBA nor 
need to understand how GEAS works as a whole to help. Just contact us 
via email or in irc (irc.openprojects.net #gnuenterprise) if you like C 
coding and have a little spare time :-)


Parser improvements
-------------------

The parser now understands the int64 data type, the rest of geas still 
has to learn it. We need int64 for amounts of money and other units.

Several bugs in the parser code have been fixed.

The parser is now able to parse the complete tree of business objects 
from the gnue-config directory, which contains all the objects from the 
official proposal so far.


Savannah
--------

We have decided to accept support requests for GEAS via savannah, the 
sourceforge clone dedicated to GNU projects.

Visit http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnue. You can
* post a support request
* view and discuss about news
* browse the cvs tree online
* view a list of tasks for the project (currently incomplete, as we are 
only testing this)

Currently, only GEAS developers use the savannah features, and this is a 
temporary solution. We will yet to have decide whether we will stick to 
savanna or build our own system.

The "Homepage" and "Files" links are broken, and we will probably not 
fix this before we have dicided on using savanah long-term or not.


Thanks,
--
Reinhard Mueller
GNU Enterprise project
http://www.gnue.org