GemKit in VW7.8

So, I have GemKit running in 7.5.  I think I need to get newer versions of GemBuilder/S but it basically runs.  I thought I'd try loading it into 7.8 to see what happens.

It took several tries to get GemKit loaded into 7.8.  I learned that:

• You can't load Searchlight before loading GemKit.  There's an interaction that causes problems.  I'll investigate that later.
• You must turn off Atomic Loading to load GemKit. When Atomic Loading was turned on, I got into an ugly infinite loop that I couldn't interrupt and that allocated memory until it ran out and crashed.  It wasn't a pretty picture

In the end, I was able to get it loaded and get some of the basic things working.  I've also gone through and looked at all the base overrides and base extensions.  I have agreement in principle from Cincom that they would work with  me to reduce the number of overrides by adding code and hooks to the base where it makes sense and where it doesn't impact the design of the base system.

I can see already that my challenges in this project will be:

• Getting GemKit working with Atomic Loading
• Resolving the conflict between GemKit and Searchlight
• Adapting GemKit to the new Glorp interface to Store
• Adapting GemKit to the new Store Repository browsing tools.  The classes that GemKit used to extend to do this are no longer there.
• Adapting to the newest changes to the merge tool
• Getting Refactorings to work on GemStone code (if this is even possible)
• Performance

So far, though, I feel like I'm off to a good start.