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If you can join the call, or are willing to comment on the topics submitted via the meeting page, please add your name, institution, and repository URL to the Call Attendees section below.

Meeting notes

Interest of DCAT members in the new User Interface

The main concern of DCAT members is the inclusion of currently included functionality on which their institution relies. This of course, will be the key requirement the UI development team will focus on. The goal is to first create a prototype version of the Angular 2 UI which contains all functionality from both current user interfaces. This prototype should not contain any new functionality. In a later stage this version can be extended with new flagship functionality.

Next to the inclusion of current functionality, it should also be the case the new user interface is as user friendly as possible.

During the meeting many DCAT members expressed interest in volunteering for the UI development project, be it as a developer, analyst or tester. The DSpace steering group is currently also working on a document expressing the necessity of a new unified UI. This document can be used to justify time spent on the project towards management.

Current progress on the Angular 2 User Interface

Tim Donohue will not have much time to spend on DSpace for the remainder of the year. Two people stepped up to start up and lead the DSpace 7 development team. Art Lowel from Atmire will be in charge of the UI developments, while Andrea Bollini from 4science will lead the API developments.

As mentioned above, Art and Andrea will commit to port the current functionality from out of DSpace JSPUI and XMLUI to the new User Interface.

Next to this, they will also try to enhance DSpace's consistency to the maximum possible.

The reason why consistency is high on the priority list, is that even when staying within one User Interface, there are still multiple ways of doing the same thing. The goal would be to create a set of development guidelines for DSpace developers to create new functionality and customizations. This should facilitate the integration of such functionality in the standard DSpace code, as well as it should make DSpace's source code more comprehensible for all.

The current goal is to have a consistent prototype containing all currently included features by the Open Repositories 2017 conference in June. It is not required for people contributing to the development of DSpace 7 to attend this conference.

DCAT members willing to contribute can use the DCAT mailing list for internal communication. For general messages towards the entire community the DSpace general mailing list can be used.

It would be considered as a best practice this DSpace 7 outreach group holds meetings at least bi-weekly.

New functionality

The question arose whether it would be interesting to include new flagship functionality in DSpace 7. This would make it easier for repository users to defend the migration to DSpace 7 with their management.

Although this is certainly a good argument to include new functionality in DSpace 7, the idea is that leaving out current functionality would impact the migration to DSpace 7 in a negative way. For this reason including current functionality has a higher priority than developing new features.

Angular 2

The decision of using angular 2 as the javascript framework to use for the development of the new user interface was preceded by a prototype challenge. During this challenge many technologies were put to the test to use as the core technology for the new User Interface. The main reason Angular 2 had the preference is because of the expected community around this framework. Considering the large success of the first version of Angular it is likely Angular 2's developer community will substantially grow in a short time period. This should make it easier for institutions to find developers for their DSpace project.

Call Attendees