[Koha-devel] Time for reflexion

[Clay Fouts]

Hello, Miguel.

You state well the necessity of adopting these sorts of strategies to
promote the long term viability of Koha. Without architectural clarity, the
ability to add and refine features is growing increasingly difficult without
stepping on other people's work and introducing action-at-a-distance bugs.
Working toward a solution to this dilemma is exactly the purpose of having a
technical committee^H^H^H^H^H^H^H meetings to hash these issues out and try
to develop a consensus on which tools and patterns would best suit Koha,
then draw a road map describing incremental steps developers can take in
order to get from point A to point B.

I have a few high-level ideas toward this end:
* start separating out the monolithic C4 modules into Model and Controller
modules, cleaning up circular dependencies as needed.
* move most of the contents of .pl files into the View modules.
* switch to more flexible template system, like TT.
* split out C4::Context into "user" context for authorization, "schema"
context for data sources, "environment" context for CGI vs. CLI vs. PSGI
* centralize database access calls, either through an ORM or through a
customized layer on top of DBI.

I think the specific tools applied are less critical than the underlying
principles which any number of those tools could facilitate.

Cheers,
Clay


2010/11/12 Miguel Angel Calvo Lázaro <mac.xercode at gmail.com>

> 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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