The state of the work is that is in progress. Like Fedora 4, CLAW is a complete rewrite of the entire Islandora stack. It is a collaborative community effort, and needs the resources of the community. An update on the project was included in the most recent Islandora Community Newsletter. You can check that out here.
If you want to see CLAW completed faster, you can help!
Looking ahead to Fedora 4? Interested in working with Islandora CLAW? Want to help out but don't know where to start? Want to adopt it and need some training? CLAW Committer Diego Pino will be giving a several-part series of lessons on how to develop in the CLAW project, starting March 1st at 11AM EST and continuing weekly until you're all CLAW experts. These will be held as interactive lessons via Google Hangouts (class size permitting). Registration is completely free but spaces may be limited. Sign up here to take part.
The Islandora community just wrapped up its second volunteer sprint on Islandora CLAW. The first sprint, back in November, was a broad introduction with a focus on documentation and knowledge transfer. This time around we switched gears and put the emphasis on writing code, with a smaller team made up of developers and most of the Islandora CLAW Committers, working on tasks relating to porting the existing Java based services to PHP services. The team for this sprint was:
Their numbers were small but their accomplishments were great. Diego takes the MVP award for this sprint, tackling the resource PHP service and working through API improvements for Chullo, the CLAW equivalent of Tuque. Jared did some updates for our vagrant installer. Nick coordinated the sprint and put up an updated the Islandora PCDM diagrams. Nigel worked on integration testing and came away with a plan to redo the CLAW build scripts in Ansible. The whole crew worked together throughout the sprint, strategizing and reviewing each other's code.
The next sprint will be in the new year, running January 18 - 29. It will be another focussed, developer-driven sprint, so if you are interested in digging into the code behind CLAW and making a contribution, please sign up! If you have any questions about contributing to a sprint in the future, please do not hestitate to contact CLAW Project Director, Nick Ruest.
Back in September, the Islandora community completed its first volunteer sprint, a maintenance sprint on Islandora 7.x-1.x that cleaned up 38 tickets in advance of the 7.x-1.6 release (November 4th). For our second sprint (and likely for all sprints in the future), we moved over to Islandora's future and did our work on Islandora 7.x-2.x (also known as CLAW). With CLAW being very new to the vast majority of the community, we put the focus on knowledge sharing and exploring the new stack, with a a lot user documentation and discussion tickets for new folks to dig their teeth into. A whopping 17 sprinters signed up:
We got started on Monday, November 2nd with a live demo of CLAW provided by Nick Ruest and Danny Lamb, which has been recorded for anyone who'd like to take it in on their own time:
And then a virtual meeting to discuss how we'd approach the sprint and hand out tickets. As with our previous sprint, we mixed collaboration with solo work, coordinating via the #islandora IRC channel on freenode and with discussion on GitHub issues and pull requests. We stayed out of JIRA this time, doing all of our tracking with issues right in the CLAW GitHub Repo. In the end, we closed up nine tickets, and there should be extra kudos for Donald Moses from UPEI, who was the sprint MVP with his wonderful user documentation:
The existing CLAW Committers also tackled some more technical issues, such as Solr provisioning in vagrant or setting up the CLAW vagrant to easily deploy on Digital Ocean or Amazon Web Services.
Nick Ruest put together a pretty awesome visualization of work on CLAW so far, where you can see the big burst off activity in November from our sprint:
You should also note that even in the early days of the project, activity on the code is usually followed up by activity on the documentation - that's a deliberate approach to make documenting CLAW an integral part of developing CLAW, so that when you are ready to adopt it, you'll find a rich library of technical, installation, and user documentation to support you.
With the success of the first two sprints, we are going to start going monthly. The next sprint will be December 7th - 18th and we are looking for volunteers to sign up. This sprint will have a more technical focus, concentrating on improvements in a single area of the stack; PHP Services. We're especially looking for some developers who'd like to contribute to help us reach our goals. That said, there is always a need for testers and reviewers, so don't be afraid to sign up even if you are not a developer.
PHP Services description: Have the majority of RESTful services pulled out of the CMS context, and exposed so that Drupal hooks or Event system can interact with them. We've already implemented two (images and collections) in Java, and we'd like to start by porting those over. These services will handle operations on PCDM objects and object types. There are lots of different ways to do this (Silex, Slim, Phalcon, Symfony, etc...), but the core idea is maintaining these as a separate layer.
What about Chullo?
Chullo will be the heart of the micro services. If everything is written properly the code reuse will allow for individual services to be a thin layer to expose the Chullo code in a particular context.
Have you heard talk in the Islandora community lately about Islandora CLAW? Been wondering what that is?
As many of you are aware, the Islandora Community has been working on a new version that will be compatible with Fedora 4. We use an approximation of Drupal versioning for our own versions, so we fell into referring to that project as Islandora 7.x-2.x, with the current Fedora 3 compatible stack as Islandora 7.x-1.x. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
After any number of discussions, and several public presentations, about Islandora 7.x-2.x and its development, the project team proposed that maybe we could give it a working name that would be easier to reference, and more distinct from the Fedora 3 compatible stack, so we could stop rattling off numbers. The proposal went to the Islandora Roadmap Committee a few weeks ago, tied to a proposal to move 7.x-2.x development out of Islandora-Labs and into its own GitHub organization. A few names were bounced around, but in the end, we settled on a self-referential backronym: CLAW Linked Asset WebFramework, or just plain CLAW. And because a good number of us watched Inspector Gadget growing up, out lobster mascot got some extra gear.
And there you have it. Islandora CLAW is Islandora 7.x-2.x, just easier to say, and with an adorable mascot.
