During 2008′s Google Summer of Code I introduced a new storage abstraction layer to the MoinMoin wiki engine. This allows you to run moin on a variety of backends (filesystem, mercurial, etc.).
This year (2009) I participated again. My application contained three major areas of work:
- Reintroducing ACLs for the storage branch.
- Adding fairly advanced ‘routing’ configuration capabilities for your storage backend(s).
- Adding a SQLAlchemy backend which, in theory, should support a variety of RDBMS.
The first two objectives were finished quite well. Two different pieces of middleware were introduced for both, the ACLs and the routing. You can now use several different backends in a simple or optionally fairly complex way. You could just use one single filesystem backend or potentially hundreds of different backends, each with different ACLs applied, and mount each one into its own namespace (you may be familiar with this concept from UNIX, where you can mount discs and such into arbitrary places of the filesystem tree).
In addition to that, ACLs have been refactored. ‘revert’ and ‘delete’ were removed (obviously you will still be able to perform the corresponding actions from the UI), ‘create’ and ‘destroy’ were added.
As for the SQLAlchemy backend, we do have a somewhat working version. Unfortunately it still suffers from severe performance problems. Originally I wanted to fix that after SoC, but real-life (bachelor’s thesis, etc.) caught me, so I will have to postpone that. If you have some SQLAlchemy experience and want to help out here (or with something else), you are very welcome to join us (#moin-dev on irc.freenode.net).
For an overview of what else has been done during GSoC 2009 on the storage side of things, take a look at the following resources:
Please keep in mind that this is still fairly alpha. Especially the UI is for developers and geeks only and will be redone properly (with Jinja2) before the release (help needed here as well).
Thanks to the whole moin crew and especially my mentor Thomas Waldmann for the nice and fun collaboration!
(Oh and – hopefully – hello planet python!)
| 0 comments | Oct 20, 2009 2:57:00 AM | coding, gsoc, MoinMoin, planet-python, planet-ubuntu, python, sqlalchemy |