MVC, Fluid and Live Webcasts

By: Sebastian Kurfürst

My musings about interesting parts of TYPO3 development - MVC in 4.3, Fluid, Team Spirit and live webcasts.

After a poll on Doodle and another check from Jeff, a native English speaker, I finally renamed "Beer3" to "Fluid" - a name which fits better into the overall TYPO3 world I think. So, go through your brain disk, erase Beer3 and replace it by Fluid! Besides, I've spent the last Friday developing basic autocompletion and auto-help support for Eclipse and Fluid templates! It works as follows:

• Trigger the XSD Generation for a given namespace. There will be a web-bases wizard which guides you through these steps.
• Include the generated XML Schema into your XML document
• Be happy about autocompletion :-)

See the image on the right for a screenshot of it in action!

 

I've been fortunate to participate at a TYPO3 Coding Weekend in Karlsruhe, where we reviewed Andreas Wolf's work on the TCEForms Refactoring, and kickstarted the MVC project for TYPO3 4.3.

Speaking of the MVC project - we are currently in the process of writing and refining a specification document for it. We are very keen on comments, so please visit the typo3.projects.typo3v4 newsgroup to share your thoughts! The specification phase will be finished around mid-january, when we will start a quite intense implementation phase, so we'll hopefully be ready for TYPO3 4.3.

 

But back to the review meeting - as Ingmar brought his webcam along, we tried something new: a live webcast (video + audio) of the whole weekend. In peak times, we had 30 viewers, which was quite a funny feeling. I think it was a really nice way for community involvement: People saw that something was going on, and at some points, we could just ask our viewers some question, and in most occasions, someone was around who could answer it! So we profited from the webcast as well :-)

That's why I'd like to investigate some more in online live-streaming: What I would like really much is some kind of "live TV show" (which would also be recorded), f.e. showcasing TYPO3 4.3 - tuning in with various guests all around the world and demonstrating new features. (It is not meant to replace any of the professional podcasts by Robert or Kasper, it is more thought as an addition.)

The most difficult part I have found so far is Desktop Streaming support - the ability to share one's desktop and mix it into the video stream. (Alternatively, it'd be cool if the desktop would always be visible and automatically be synchronized with the video stream).

Do you like the idea? If yes, did you do something like this before, have some experience, product or online platform suggestions, ...? Please let me know!

Cheers, and Merry Christmas,
Sebastian

---