I have been lucky enough to spend the last year working with brilliant a new team of developers, in the logistics industry.
Separated from nearly a decade steeped in Business Intelligence and ITIL, it has been a fantastic opportunity learning opportunity and has widened both my outlook and skills.
Sometime around March 2009, I started coding the network engine for Norman, and realised, fairly quickly, that I should have started from a distributed paradigm to start with. With the luxury of this being my own project, rather than having a Project Manager breathing down my neck, I decided to restart the project from scratch - DNorm or Distributed Norm.
It also has a larger an outlook than the original Norm. Norm was originally envisioned as a framework, for developing applications that deal with distributed metadata with a large number of relationships. DNorm, however will also deal with loosely couple as well as dynamic relationships between metadata, as well as providing a working metadata storage application, DSL modelling and code library generation.
I have reused a fair bit of the old code, however, most of it is new.
The current network engine has been written using a libraries from my current employee, a .NET implementation of the Python Twisted framework that we may or may not release under the BSD open source license. Until that is decided, or I replace the engine, I don't want to release too much of the code around that in case I, inadvertently, release a copyrighted pattern or library.
I am planning on replacing the engine with my own, sooner or later, however, until then I will be a little quiet on the Norman front, though I have had to develop a few nice libraries along the way that I may concentrate on until I resolve the legality of sourcing the distribution engine.
