MarkW, I haven't been ignoring this, I just needed to digest it a bit and see if I can be constructive in response.
On Sep 22, 2008, at 7:08 AM, Mark H. Wood wrote: > Yum, alphabet soup for breakfast! > > This note does a good job of communicating excitement, but for those > of us without a Library and Information Science background, is there > something very basic we could read to help us figure out why these > things should excite us and, in some cases, what they are in the first > place? (For example, I'm pretty sure that here CMIS is not the OSI > Common Management Information Service.) Correct it is not that. Here is a good starting point for finding out a bit more about CMIS. http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS > > Right now my reaction is, "ouch, look at all the new stuff I have to > know so as not to break things when I muck around in the code!" I'd > rather be excited, because it makes the learning easier. But I don't > know how to get excited about these things. I think one of our requirements here is to create a "better" platform that corrects some of the mistakes that we've learned about from the users and developers of DSpace. I think the excitement I experience is that by aligning the DSpace implementation with best practices, proven technologies and new initiatives to standardize services is twofold: 1.) For Selfish reasons: My own services will become more valuable and applicable even outside of the narrow domain of IR/DL. 2.) For Altruistic reasons: We all will benefit by being able to tap into a mainstream sector in the Open Source community for resources and tools. But, ultimately, I think your statement "ouch, look at all the new stuff I have to know so as not to break things when I muck around in the code!" shows one of the biggest concerns we have with DSpace pre-2.0, that as an Application Manager / Systems Admin that you have to be mucking about in the code in the first place. In an ideal world, we'd have all kinds of "configuration" to make it possible for you not to have to do this, but what we can see is that as more and more "hands" are touching the codebase and adding this sort of capability, they are also making the platform more complex and hardcoded together in the process... So I hope what is coming from this is: (1) stable versioned API/Contracts (2) a clean separation of concerns (3) best practices and rules around where code changes can occur in the codebase Because right now, every change someone makes in the codebase makes your migration path more difficult. My question to you is, do you want more of the status quo, or would you dare to dream and participate in the manifestation of a better platform maintained by a larger community of developers. Cheers, Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
