Withdrawal from MidCOM Project

Hello Community,

I regret to announce that I will withdraw from the MidCOM Project effective as of 2006-08-01. I have found a new employment last week which will start at that date. Unfortunalety, this will mean that I am no longer able to divert any time of mine to the management or the continous development of MidCOM, neither privatly nor on the job.

I know that this comes on a rather short notice, but sometimes one must grasp the chances as they offer him. My new employer is the third biggest IT System Houses in all Germany, which builds a new unit devoted to ERP system development.

However, this does not mean that MidCOM development will come to an halt entirely. Tarjei Huse, who was aiding me in core and component development for a long time now, has agreed to succeed my in my position as Lead Developer. He has a good knowledge of the core architectureand enough experience with MidCOM to keep development on its tracks. He has my full support and my full authority to continue where I will be leaving off. Please give him the same support and trust you gave me.

To be honest, I feel a bit strange at the prospect of "giving up my baby". Especially after all these years. I have always tried to do my best in keeping a stable platform to build on. The current core is more then good enough for an upcoming stable release, except for the final packaging efforts which need to be done.

What I recommend for the immediate future is to drop the original plan of a full rewrite for PHP5, not just for the missing manpower, but also because many parts of the current core are good, why rewrite bugproofed code. Instead you should refactor part after part, like I have been doing in the last monts. It has proven to be a quite successful strategy, applied carefully it should be able to yield a stable, PHP5ed core version within a year or so. The start would be a new core architecture, which splits the current application.php into a new request-oriented class tree.

But enough details for now. ;-)

I will try to stay available in an advisory role as long as I can, of course.

Apart from that, I give my project the very best wishes for the future.

Note that any further discussion of this should be done on the new MidCOM Development Mailinglist (Archives) hosted on gforge.nehmer.net.

Live long and prosper!
Torben Nehmer
MidCOM Founder and Core Developer