Retrospective BlackForest Sprint at Haufe

Last week, Robert Niederreiter and I participated at the Blackforest Sprint. First we need to say a big thanks to the Haufe-Team (and all others helping) for the excellent sprint organisation!

We worked on the refactoring of Devilstick. Core parts of the current code were rewritten.  Florian Friesdorf (known for his GSOC Paula-project), Markus Leist and Oliver Roch joined our team.

After introducing the team to Devilstick - which is in late (working) prototyping state - Robert continued the refactoring of the meta-modelling framework (cornerstone.model). Before sprint we already wrote the meta-meta-model-level, at sprint the meta-modelling level was finished.

Meanwhile we defined the new public API for the Data-Access-Objects (DAOs). We decided to keep it as near as possible to the zope-container-API. Here we had lots of good discussion.

Florian explored the best way to hook in persistency in a generic way. We decided to use Zope's persistent API as the base and start from here.

I started the generic model im-/ export module. We decided to take forest and simplifiy it. Forest is a multipass/multichannel converter module we wrote two years ago at a sprint in Bozen. It provides a reusable generic converter to be used i.e. for im- and export or conversion/transformation of data. "devilstick.polymerase" is a concret importer for the xml-dialect used for devilstick models. Here some work need to be done.

We did lots of core-framework work. For Markus and Oliver it was difficult to get in. Oliver decided to join a different team on day two. Anyway, both asked important questions in our discussions and provided valuable uses-cases which helped us to refine Devilstick.

Our next tasks are defined. We will continue to work on them. The next scheduled sprint with Devilstick topics is the Bolzano Plone Sprint from November 11th til November 13th , 2008.