Version 1.7.0

We invite developers to help with the next major release of DSpace, version 1.7.0, which is planned for release in December 2010.

Contributors are strongly encouraged to obtain the source code using Subversion (SVN). This is very straightforward, and we've published a guide to doing so here: ContributionGuidelines

Organizational

Release Coordination

• Release Coordinator: Peter Dietz, Ohio State University Libraries

1.7.0 Code Committing Rules:

1. No incomplete features in "Trunk", ever. If you are in-progress on a feature, create an SVN sandbox or branch area to work on it, and pull it over to Trunk once it has been completed and is ready for testing & release. (This will hopefully help us to avoid encountering a situation where we need to revert a large, unfinished patch at the last moment.)
   • Modules which do not reside in DSpace "Trunk" should also follow this rule. If there is major rework to be done on a module, create a "branch" to do that work and migrate it back to the Module's Trunk once it is ready for release.
2. All new features must have documentation before committing to Trunk. If a feature has no documentation, it should not be committed to Trunk until there is some minimal documentation (minimal documentation includes documenting all configuration options). This will help us all ensure that Documentation is ready by the time we get to 1.7.0 RC1, and hopefully lessen the time that any one person has to spend cleaning up or rewriting documentation.

Timeline and Proceeding

Proposed Release Timeline (all dates are tentative):

• August 13, 2010 : Milestone 1 - "Feature Decision Day"
  • By this milestone, all major features or major architectural changes for 1.7.0 release should be approved by the DSpace Committers Group and be somewhere in SVN (they need not be fully finished, but should be moving along in their development process).
• October 22, 2010 : Feature Freeze (all features must have initial documentation to be accepted)
  • All 1.7.0 features (major and minor) must be finished, committed to Trunk and have initial documentation. After this date, no new features will be accepted for the 1.7.0 release. Any features which are not finished or ready will need to be scheduled for the next DSpace release.
  • Modules which do not reside in Trunk (e.g. dspace-services) should also undergo a Feature Freeze on this date, so that we can work to stabilize all code used by out-of-the-box DSpace.
• October 29, 2010 : Final Documentation "Due Date"
  • All documentation changes need to be submitted, so that they can be cleaned & packaged up in preparation for RC1. This includes Upgrade Documentation, Release Notes, etc.
    • Obviously, if errors are found in docs, they can be changed during testing process, etc. But, the goal here is to attempt to have as close to a final version of the Documentation as possible, in preparation for the RC1 release.
• November 5, 2010 : Release Candidate 1
• November 8-12, 2010 : 1.7 Testathon Week
• December 3, 2010 : Release Candidate 2 (if necessary), or Final Release
• December 6-15, 2010 : Final Testing / Bug Fixing (if necessary)
• December 17, 2010 : Final Release

Release Process needs to proceed according to the following Maven release process ReleaseProcedure

New Features

• AIP Backup / Restore (Tim Donohue/DuraSpace) – Allows for a more complete backup of DSpace into generic METS-based packages known as Archival Information Packages (AIP's). These AIPs could also be used to migrate DSpace content (Communities/Collections/Items) between DSpace and non-DSpace instances that support AIP.
• DSpace Discovery, (contributed by @mire, NV.) A Solr based, faceted search layer to provide a deeper, and more intuitive look at repository contents.
• Unit Testing, which will allow each code component to be able to be tested so that it does what it intends to do.
• Most Used Items list, which can replace or complement the existing Recently Submitted Items list.
• PowerPoint Text Extraction Media Filter - Allows for full-text searching of PowerPoint bitstreams

New Features in XMLUI

• Two XMLUI themes (contributed by @mire, NV.)
  • A function library to aid xmlui theme development which refactors the existing dri2xhtml.
  • Mirage, a theme which is another new look utilizing the new xmlui function library

New Features in JSPUI

• Added the ability to redirect to the current page after authentication

Improvements

Graham Triggs has launched a Code Quality crusade and has dug into deep and dark corners of the DSpace source code armed with nothing more than a torch, machete, and a fancy plugin called QAplug to systematically drive out evil spirits haunting the DSpace code. See: https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-707

In addition to that, the rest of the general improvements are:

• Reducing the cost of browse prunes
• SOLR
  • Switched to use autoCommit which reduces resource exhaustion
  • Added solr.optimize which can called via command line to essentially "defragment" the solr index, resulting in slightly better solr performance over time.
• Item bitstream sorting/ordering can be specified according to sequence or name
• Moving the documentation into the Confluence wiki so that workload can be divided, and that the documentation is improved.

Bug Fixes

• Batch Metadata Import will now validate metadata fields in CSV's
• Restricted items / metadata is better protected from exposure via web services: OAI
• File handle leak in ItemImporter closed.  Fixes issues when max_files_open exceeded on some systems.
• Database connections released when no longer needed in xmlui BitstreamReader.  Fixes problem getting connections from the database pool while simultaneously downloading multiple large files.

Changes

See the DSpace 1.7.0 JIRA Page for a list of all currently proposed changes.

Removed / Deprecated

Most command line scripts that have historically resided in [dspace]/bin/ were deprecated in 1.6, and are now removed in 1.7. They have been replaced with the configurable command launcher, which eases the cross platform development of scripts. Discussion at: [http://jira.dspace.org/jira/browse/DS-646|http://jira.dspace.org/jira/browse/DS-646].

Example usage of the launcher:

One can no longer run:

[dspace]/bin/create-administrator

The method of calling the DSpace launcher is now:

[dspace]/bin/dspace create-administrator

Unsure / Postponed for Next Release

Note: Developers, you need to contact the release coordinator and get approval to commit a feature that did not make it in by the feature freeze date. The sooner you tackle this the better the chance that your code will not cause a problem with the release schedule.

There are a few projects that were strongly desired to make it into DSpace 1.7, however, work will need to be done to make them into the release, or they are going to be postponed for the next release of DSpace, likely 1.8.

Rewrite of Creative Commons licensing (MIT - ready to go) – would improve upon the features of the current CC licensing submission step
* Currently only against XMLUI from MIT
* Legacy problem – do we update old license to new or not? Currently MIT runs 'split version' with old licenses looking like old, and new look like new.

Google Scholar work (MIT - ready to go) – better metadata for Google Scholar (citation tags in header).

*[CGIProposal|CGIProposal] (Richard Rodgers/MIT – Interface & XML serialization implementation should be ready), based on the [Item type based submission patch|http://jira.dspace.org/jira/browse/DS-464] picked up by Robin Taylor (initially a GSoC project) – would allow for type-based submission processes (e.g. Theses/Dissertations could have different submission steps than articles/papers).
Context Guided Ingest – define an interface, where any submission code can write "attributes" and can retrieve those again later on. Can add any new attributes/values that you want for your submission code. Could be serialized to XML (using input-forms.xml) OR have an implementation of that service that stores in DB (recommended). JPA2?
seems similar to SimpleStorage Service (user centered storage of state info) – Mark Diggory.

*[CurationTaskProposal|CurationTaskProposal] (Richard Rodgers/MIT – some will be ready) – would allow for a more standard way to integrate curation tools (e.g. virus scanning, format identification, etc) into DSpace Lightweight framework to attach curation tasks – 3-4 tasks for 1.7. These could be kicked off by commandline (in batch) or Admin UI (potentially) 1. Automated replication
2. Streamlined Checksum Checker
3. Virus Checker - ClamAV (Tcp socket communication)
4. ??? Better content format identification (may not be ready for 1.7)
Could relate to Scheduler service (Spring based) in Modules area. Allows you to register & schedule events. – Mark Diggory

Possibly one or more of the [Google Summer of Code|Google Summer of Code] 2010 projects (if they are ready/stable enough for release)
 - REST API?  -- Based on previous discussion on developers list / irc channel it will be most probably released asynchronously. It is in the process but RC 1 deadline is too short for all parts to be implemented. Bojan Suzic --

SWORD Client for DSpace? (Robin Taylor – may be ready, Richard Jones & Stuart Lewis are interested in helping) – would allow DSpace to push/submit content to other SWORD enabled repositories

• For closed & open access repositories – add a button to transfer content from a closed to an open repository.

DCDate improvements: has DCDate been rewritten / replaced ?