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developers_call:minutes20110322

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VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 22, 2011

Attending: Lutz Biedinger, Demian Katz, Daniel Lovins, Tuan Nguyen, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Luke O'Sullivan, Fang Peng, Sean Purcell, Preetha Rao, Graham Seaman

Agenda

1. VuFind 1.1 Release

VuFind 1.1 was released on 3/21 with no problems yet (other than a minor last-minute fix to the DEB package). Demian retested install documentation on fresh installs of Ubuntu and Fedora and made minor adjustments to bring them up to date. The demo install has been updated to the new version. Please try the new release and report any issues if you notice them.

2. Integration Testing Update

Preetha has switched from using the PEAR Selenium testing library to using the built in PHPUnit Selenium support; this works much better. A new set of sample tests has been committed to the trunk and have passed successfully in Hudson.

Documentation on the tests can be found on the unit tests page of the wiki.

3. New JIRA Tickets

  • VUFIND-389 - use MARC linking fields in record view; will probably be committed very soon.
  • VUFIND-390 - Horde/YAML library is no longer available through PEAR; now bundled with trunk, but should be replaced with something else eventually.
  • VUFIND-391 - configurable recommendations modules in Author module; committed already and included in 1.1 release.
  • VUFIND-392 - Content Café cover support; committed already and included in 1.1 release.
  • VUFIND-393 - memory problems with large OAI-PMH harvests; fixed in 1.1 release.
  • VUFIND-394 - duplicate ticket about install script problems; no action needed.

4. New Mobile Theme

Tuan expressed interest in building a new mobile theme using the jQuery Mobile library. This may be more device-agnostic than the current iWebKit implementation. Through surveys at York, it was determined that mobile users are most interested in two things: searching for books and checking account status. Tuan has already got a simple demo of search working and is looking for help developing more features within the theme – Demian and Fang offered to help. Tuan will check in his work so far so that others can build on it. We will discuss this further on the next call to more specifically divide up the work.

5. Plug-in Architecture

Demian has ordered another set of books on Zend and is continuing to think about a new architecture. Once the books arrive and he is done reading, he will begin building a prototype to demonstrate key features.

So far, the only book Demian has read is Zend Enterprise PHP Patterns, which has a brief introduction to the framework but mostly covers a broad range of topics in relatively shallow depth. Reviews of other titles will be shared in future meetings.

Tuan expressed concern that Zend may be heavier-weight (and slower) than we need. We should definitely benchmark our prototype before we get too deep into writing it, in case a different framework would be better suited to the project. York University opted against Zend last time they had to develop a PHP app, choosing CodeIgniter instead (but now Kohana may be a better choice).

There was discussion of what a framework actually needs to provide. Demian is mainly concerned about extensibility of classes without modifying core code and theme inheritance. A good (better than Smarty) templating engine is also helpful, as is strong testing support.

Tuan may be interested in building a Kohana prototype at the same time as Demian's Zend prototype for comparison purposes.

6. Other Topics?

Luke may be available soon to help with feature development (once the additional ILS functions patch he is working on with Demian is complete); he will likely also collaborate with Tuan on bookbag functionality.

Fang mentioned limitations of VuFind in dealing with MARC 880 linked title fields. The VUFIND-389 patch mentioned above does not help with this; it may be a subject for future development. Examples will be provided.

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (GMT - 4:00).

developers_call/minutes20110322.1449666806.txt.gz · Last modified: 2015/12/09 13:13 by demiankatz