[Koha-devel] Time for reflexion

[Miguel Angel Calvo Lázaro]

We want to take this opportunity to congratulate Biblibre for initiating the
search engine change with which we are identified and in which we would like
to collaborate, due to the important problem on the facets.

We believe that it is time to examine some aspects of the project, with no
intention of offending any member of the community in doing so.

In Xercode, despite being a new company, some of our members have been
working on the project since 2007, when we first came into contact with
PERL. All of our present developers have been working on PHP and JAVA
projects. Since then, we have been conscious that the structure of KOHA is
unlike any other major project we have worked on previously.

In our opinion, it has become necessary to upgrade technologies employed in
the project making KOHA more competitive with similar software.

We believe that is urgent to use a framework like DANCER, SOLR as an index
engine (our main problem with clients), increase performance, ...  We
believe, however, that this will not completely resolve our present
situation due to the fact that the project structure is not sufficiently
defined.

A good example is the propose of search engine change, a current point of
conflict. We have traditionally followed an Object Oriented Metodology
(working with interfaces and abstract classes). By doing this we would
achieve an abstraction of the search engine and the result of using a
method, for example “engineSearch”, would be the same with indifference to
use SOLR or ZEBRA and the majority of problems that we are currently facing
in the community (principally the integration of the diverse developments by
each member) can be easily resolved.

Applying this philosophy to .pl files would make them more concise and more
easily understood. DRUPAL and OTRS (PERL) are good examples composed by a
kernel and specific modules.

Considering all of this, this is a perfect moment for reflexion due to the
fact that these points may affect the scalability and evolution of KOHA.

Regards,


*
Miguel Angel Calvo Lázaro*

*Dirección de Soluciones*
miguel.calvo at xercode.es
Telf. 653 038 238

Rosalía de Castro, 53 4º C
15895 Milladoiro - Ames (A Coruña)
Telf. 881 975 576
www.xercode.es
info at xercode.es


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