Agile Languages & Fedora — Update from OR09
Posted on 20. May, 2009 by matt in Collaboration, Fedora, Matt's Adventures and Musings
Leading up to this year’s Open Repositories, it became clear that there was demand for a BOF (Birds of Feather) session focused on agile languages and Fedora. I pitched the idea in an email to a couple colleagues beforehand and then announced the BOF at my presentation on Monday morning. Rather than constricting it to Fedora projects, I billed it as Agile Languages and Repositories. About 30 people showed up. The split was pretty even between Ruby, Python, and PHP developers. About a third seemed to be Java developers in the process of defecting. In addition to people doing stuff with Fedora, there were a handful of DSpace developers and possibly a couple who maintain ePrints repositories.
For the first half of the BOF we sat in mixed groups, eating our lunches and each talking about the work we do. We then split up by language (Ruby, Python, PHP) and discussed language-specific topics. For that second half I sat at the Ruby table where we talked about ActiveFedora, JRuby, RDF support for Ruby, MODS support for Ruby, Solr (solr-ruby and RSolr), and how Blacklight fits into the mix.
I closed the conversation by asking if we should set up email lists for collaboration. It seemed reasonable to set up a general mailing list for the solutions community as well as a list specifically for people doing stuff with Ruby, Fedora repositories, and (most likely) ActiveFedora. I also resolved to encourage the creation of Python-oriented and PHP-oriented equivalents. For now I have created two lists on Google Groups. The first one, Fedora Commons Create, is for general discourse about creating client applications for Fedora. The second, ActiveFedora / Ruby + Fedora Commons, is for Ruby-specific collaboration.
In the end, I was really pleased to realize that for the first time we had a substantial group of people interested in each of the main interpreted languages (Ruby, Python, PHP) and each group had at least one open source Fedora-based project to use as a starting point for their conversations. The Ruby group had ActiveFedora, the Python group had Ben O’Steen’s work and Peter Herndon’s Django integration, and the PHP/Drupal people had Islandora & Fez to start from.
This was a comfortable step forward from the scenario as it was a year ago.
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| Fedora Commons Create |
| Visit this group |
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| ActiveFedora / Ruby + Fedora Commons |
| Visit this group |