Some thoughts about the last week or so...
- We're getting close to being done with the migration of trackers from SourceForge to JIRA. The last major item is to move the task items, which we use to indicate work that's actually in progress. I was able to convert the code Chris wrote to migrate the other trackers (bugs, refactorings, new feature requests) to create the Jelly script for importing the SF tasks into JIRA, but in the process of testing, discovered that the SF export file was incomplete. This activity is now waiting on a service request with SourceForge, which hopefully will be completed soon and we can finish up our move to JIRA.
- I started looking into Zotero as it is one of the items on the list of integrations for the innovation challenge. I focused mainly on how Fedora could be used to store the information collected by Zotero. Doing this on the client is not very practical, but with the upcoming server storage capabilities of Zotero 2.0, this becomes interesting. In discussions with Eddie he pointed out that he was focusing more on allowing Zotero to easily harvest content out of Fedora using unAPI, and he gave a good overview of that work in the architecture meeting.
- After a discussion in last week's architecture meeting, I updated the fedora-client.jar to include the version of the Fedora server with which it was released. So we now have a fedora-3.0-client.jar, or at least we will as soon as my changes go into trunk.
- Looking again at the messaging client and the changes made to allow GSearch (or any other application) to make asynchronous broker connections, I realized that there's still a use case for a synchronous connection. Since a synchronous connection is implied in the MessagingClient interface, that is still the default, but passing in a parameter to start() allows the client to return while the connection is still being negotiated.
- Moving toward the goal of having a web-based administrative client for Fedora (as well as the possibility of a hosted Fedora application) I've started to investigate web-based GUI frameworks. The first of those is Adobe's Flex. I was able to create a simple application that has some admin client-type features with a small amount of xml in a relatively short amount of time.
The capabilities to connect to REST or SOAP-based web services quickly is impressive. The drawbacks of requiring a Flash player and the development tool being a commercial product do dampen my enthusiasm a bit, but I was happy to find that applications can be built using only the open-source pieces of Flex. Of course, Open Laszlo is a completely open-source alternative to Flex, so that's next on my list to consider.