VuFind® Community Call Minutes: December 7, 2021

Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Ere Maijala, Bret Stiffler

The November, 2021 Newsletter was discussed.

Demian continues to discuss this with the OLF and expects a resolution reasonably soon (though it may still take a few more months).

Demian has begun experimenting with Doctrine; he successfully ported a different project from Laminas-DB to Doctrine as a proof of concept (see VuOwma pull request #3). He plans to open a VuFind PR to begin Doctrine conversion when time permits, but time is currently limited due to end-of-year activities.

Ere asked about possible advantages of using Doctrine; Demian noted a few:

• Better separation of concerns – data models are not tightly coupled to database-level implementation details; instead, model classes represent entities, and separate service classes do the work of persisting/retrieving data.
• Good project stability – long history, huge user base, broad support for databases
• Potentially better database query modeling (a query builder somewhat similar to the Laminas DB approach of object-oriented query generation, but also the ability to write query strings in DQL, which may be more straightforward in many cases).
• Multiple layers of database interaction – i.e. high-level abstraction where useful, but also the ability to do more direct database interactions where needed (e.g. for the database upgrade functionality in the installer).

Demian is still doing research and experimentation and is open to alternatives, but Doctrine seems like the strongest contender due to the above and the fact that the laminas-db end of life note explicitly suggests it as a potential replacement.

The Laminas HTTP replacement seems less urgent, though Demian still plans to investigate further if/when time permits.

No news.

Mario is interested in moving forward with pull request #1324. He was unable to attend this call, so we will defer the discussion until next time.

Demian plans to work on “Customizing Record Views” next, but can't think of many other topics to fill in.

Ere suggested that we could consider re-recording some of the videos that have gotten out of date, rather than adding new videos and increasing the amount of content that needs to be maintained.

None this month.

The next call will be Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 9am Eastern Standard Time (14:00 GMT).