December 13, 2006

Vet Med Developers meeting 12/13/06

Planning - Ray

For Sakai v2.4 deployment, we want a road map for implementation for Summer Session 2/II. The code migration road map should be worked out by the developers and delivered for discussion and review during the first meeting of the new year.

Document remaining issues
Chris noted that the /wiki/spaces/UCDSAKAI/pages/120455357 is done. Ray stated that the team will review these issues during the first meeting of the new year as well.

Scott suggested that the programmers generate a scheduled work plan with dates and timelines, so that additional tasks/surprises can be measured and factored in against the overall plan.
Beau suggested using SVM Jira tasks to help identify map points, possibly export into MS Project.

Ray - Meeting with Kirk later today to deal with cross-listed courses and other points where the separate instances may interact.

Scott noted that the Link tool mentioned at conference may allow elegant linking between campus and VM instances of Sakai.

Servers - Beau

Beau is currently working to tear out all databases not currently in use and re-import for cleanup. He asked the programmers to clean up their test data. He plans to move my and svn repository by weekend before Xmas. He will have a restructuring discussion with Scott prior to implementing changes in the svn repository.

Conference Review - Scott/Phil

Scott felt that the Programmers Boot Camp was not too helpful; presentations were either too low level or too detailed. Distribution of topics, Hibernate, Spring, RSF, was not ideal.

Course Management presentations described functionality for user-created sites and rosters plus more integration between sites and CM provider. The combination of imported users and manually created sites may be unique to our (VM UCD) instance. In other schools, faculty create their sites and pull in their rosters rather than generating all course sites, so non-active sites are not created.

New CM UI features for associating rosters with sites which doesn't apply to our instances since we automatically relate rosters to sites. Josh Holtzman showed the api's and how they work, but it's not clear how they relate to the current provider mechanism. Hierarchical structure and roles were also demoed at the conference.

Much of the current custom code for VM should be still usable in the 2.3/2.4 upgrade.

Scott and Phil attended several RSF talks and noted that at least 4-5 components will be implementing RSF instead of JSF. Scott is concerned that because RSF is developed by single person and there is not too much documentation, implementing it generates a dependance on responses from Antranig (the RSF designer.)

Beau mentioned that there have been several discussions on Hibernate on the dev list threads. Scott noted that the problems appear to be one of users requiring more understanding and training to implement Hibernate successfully, but that it should be good for the job if properly implemented. Examples of portability and refactoring issues with Samigo and use of Spring JDBC were brought up.

Beau requested that Chuck Severance bring in Hibernate training to move community forward on addressing these types of issues.

Eval Tool

The VM team's presentation at the Tech Session was successful. There was lots of interest and positive feedback; many members asked questions about when the content will be available to others in the community. Scott would like to deliver the code to a Contrib branch in community svn as is. He feels that significant changes are required to make the code usable for other systems; he plans to include a README file to addresss these issues for potential users.
The code would require significant refactoring, mostly due to the current method of generating hierarchy from the crn - pulled from the site title; the code would need a hook to determine that hierarchy manually for others' systems. Making the code universal would require more time than is currently available to VM programmers.

He also feels that Aaron's evaluation tool from Vermont would beat them to release in pre-Fall '07.

His current plan is to concentrate on local enhancements, and perhaps to expose Eval documentation pages in our local Confluence, so that other community members can ask questions and/or make contributions to the code.

Ray stated that there may be interest from other instructors on campus, requiring adaptation and implementation of the evaluation code in the campus instance.

Some discussions during the demo were collab members inquiring about the return rate on evaluations; members were surprised at the high return rate for VM, which is not unusual since evals are required.

The programmers also attended 2.1.x branch BOF (Birds-of-a-feather) and found it not too useful.
Beau/Scott - Key point: we cannot risk sitting back on reversioning for more than an acedemic year due to the lack of support for older versions.

Other useful sessions: Scott found the last 20 minutes of Zack Thomas's debug session focused on management of source tree, talking about vendor drops, very helpful.

Phil attended several RSF sessions; he thought the framework is wonderfully robust, but was disappointed that Antranig was not able to present a higher-level view. RSF supports AJAX; Steve Githens demoed drag-n-drop implementation with RSF and AJAX. Major issue is lack of community support at this stage. He also attended the Sakai Design Patterns WG and thought Chris might benefit the community by providing input to this group.

User Issues

Chris described a user-reported issue with My Workspace; the user was trying to complete evaluation, got an error message. Chris tried a manual deletion and SU login to the correct issue. He needs to get more user info, burt thought there might be more information in the user's bug report.