[Dspace-general] Scope of DSpace (Was: Dublin Core Registry question)

[Hussein Suleman]

hi

just to add my support for this idea, i think modularisation is 
definitely the way to go! but i hope people think of modularisation 
beyond just the DSpace JARs and build system. if you are following 
Greenstone3, you will know they are modularising around some kind of Web 
Services architecture. if DSpace did something similar then we may one 
day be able to distribute software with specialised services that can 
plug into more than one digital library base system.

then it will be much more useful for anyone who produces interesting 
services (like an exotic recommender) to make them modular and available 
to the community at large ...

and a lot more cool stuff will become possible too :)

ttfn,
----hussein

=====================================================================
hussein suleman ~ hussein at cs.uct.ac.za ~ http://www.husseinsspace.com
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Richard Jones wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I've CC'd this to dspace-tech, as it seems appropriate for there also
> 
> 
>>Rather than trying to make decisions, or suggest decisions be made by
>>the DSpace community, might I suggest a path? Modularization. As much
>>as is reasonable, DSpace features should be modularized, so that there
>>is a core DSpace engine, with almost all services plug-and-play. In
>>this way it permits the community to deliberately fragment into
>>interest areas, building the modular tools the subcommunities are
>>interested in, and allowing implementors to create installations that
>>suit their needs without overburdening them with an enormously complex
>>base package. E.g., so if somebody doesn't need OAI features, or they
>>want a local system rather than an online one, they choose the modules
>>they need (or there is an install system to permit them to do so easily).
> 
> 
> Hopefully the AddOn Mech should make this process easier, and if you are
> interested in helping out or having a look at it at least, you could
> start with:
> 
> http://wiki.dspace.org/AddOnMechanism
> 
> Anyway, I have a crazy idea with regard to modularising the DSpace code
> base.  It's maybe a bit extreme in terms of organisation, but here it
> is:  Would it be sensible/useful to organise at some point a "Developer
> Camp", where those of us who wanted to could get together for anything
> up to a week at a host institution with a pile of computers and as much
> of our own code as we want to bring and actually physically start to
> pull the codebase appart into a series of modules?  It may be
> unworkable, but the way I see it is that this sort of effort is quite
> large, and requires some commitment from those undertaking it.  Since we
> all have day jobs I worry that the impetus/resources to actually make a
> start is lacking.  A blitz /may/ overcome that.  Or we might end up with
> a pile of broken code ;)
> 
> Just a thought.
> 
> Cheers,
>