Fedora 3.1 has been released!
Fedora 2.2.4 has been released!
WooHoo!
In other news, I'm working up a plan for an application called FedoraShare. This will be a front-end application for Fedora which integrates with content that is stored on other sites around the web and allows users to tag, comment on, and create relationships between any content, whether it be stored in Fedora or not. For more info, take a look at my write up and screenshot mockups.
Other than various activities surrounding the 3.1 release coming up next week, my main work of interest this week was doing a review of Open Laszlo and writing up my thoughts on Flex and Open Laszlo so far. The end goal of this investigation is to get started on a new web-based Administrator GUI for Fedora.
The first half of this week I spent with Chris at MIT sitting in on the DSpace 2.0 architecture design meeting. In this session, they were focused primarily on determining the high-level services necessary to support the next version of DSpace.
- One discussion which we returned to several times was the idea that there is fundamental set of services needed by any repository which could be constructed in a layered structure. Chris posted an initial write-up of these ideas.
- Another discussion that Chris and I had on the side with Richard Rodgers was that the notification capabilities of both Fedora and DSpace present a way to coordinate the content available in each system. An example of this could be to allow both Fedora and DSpace to store content in the same location (such as on Amazon S3), then use update notifications to create/update/delete the object model. This gets around the need to have a shared data model in order to share content.
The last half of the week was spent finishing up tasks prior to the 3.1 release.
- Completed and merged FCREPO-245, which allows GSearch (and any other user of the MessagingClient) to start up prior to the messaging provider being available. This was primarily an issue when Fedora and GSearch were running in the same server and GSearch was started first.
- Completed and started review of FCREPO-241, which provides authentication filtering for the REST API relative to the authentication settings of API-A and API-M.
Here's what I've been up to lately:
- As a presenter at the SPARC conference innovation fair, I was asked to post a graphic about my topic, which I've done here: SPARC Post. The idea is similar to FedoraShare, but using a conference organizer as an example.
- Worked on FCREPO-241 which is an issue with the REST API not correctly prompting for authentication. The REST API, up to this point, has not been included in the servlet filtering chain which allows other Fedora interfaces to authenticate users. With my updates there is now an additional filter which determines whether a REST API method is part of API-A or API-M, then passes the request along to the authentication filter if necessary. Some testing still needs to be done here, but my goal is to get this done in time for the 3.1 release.
- Talked with a couple folks at Northwestern University about a potential JCR interface implementation for Fedora which looks promising.
- Updated the SVN properties for all .bat and .sh files in trunk and GSearch. This should resolve the issue that has come up several times now of shell scripts having incorrect line terminators. This also closes FCREPO-219.
- Reviewed Eddie's work on FCREPO-215, FCREPO-223, and FCREPO-236.
- Reviewed Chris' work on FCREPO-239, FCREPO-227, and FCREPO-252.
- Finished up the migration of tasks from SourceForge to Jira. Since the SourceForge export file did not actually include all of the task information (and an issue request received no attention) I had to break down and write the code necessary to retrieve the missing bits from each task page on the SourceForge site. It did work out fine, however, so we are now moved completely over to Jira for issue tracking.
- Prepared a bit for meetings on Monday and Tuesday with DSpace since my time spent with DSpace so far has been limited.