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

Repository managers and others wishing to test the new features can visit demo.dspace.org during Testathon (Nov 8-19) or any time after then to provide feedback.

DSpace 1.7.0 is a scheduled, "time-based" release. In order to decrease delays in releasing new features and increase transparency, the DSpace Developers have decided to schedule 1.7.0 in advance and base its features on what we are able to complete within that timeframe. So, 1.7.0 will be a departure from 1.6.0 in that it may include fewer new features overall, but will be completed in a much tighter timeframe.

Scheduling releases will benefit us all as it should decrease the delays in releasing new features, and increase the transparency of the development process. The DSpace Developers feel that these benefits will far outweigh the cost of having fewer major features in a given DSpace release. We hope the DSpace Community will also realize the immediate benefits, which should allow them to receive new features more quickly, rather than potentially waiting years for the next major release of the software.

Organizational

Release Coordination

Release Coordinator: Peter Dietz, Ohio State University Libraries

Timeline and Proceeding

Release Timeline:

August 13, 2010 : Milestone 1 - "Feature Decision Day"
October 22, 2010 : Feature Freeze
October 29, 2010 : Final Documentation "Due Date"
November 5, 2010 : Release Candidate 1
November 8-19, 2010 : 1.7 Testathon
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 in DSpace 1.7

	Mirage, a clean and professional looking theme for XMLUI. dri2xhtml-alt, and xmlui theme development framework that eases XMLUI theme development. See Mirage in action at http://demo.dspace.org/xmlui. Themes contributed by @mire, NV.
	Discover, a faceted browsing and searching interface that gives a deeper and more intuitive look at repository contents. <ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="25a680d6-c6a9-4c33-bbe6-a7df0c2fb70c"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[See Discovery in action at [http://demo.dspace.org/xmlui ]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro> ] For more information, watch the video introduction to Discovery. Addon contributed by @mire, NV.
	Archival Information Package (AIP) Backup & Restore process. Allows for a backup of DSpace into a generic METS-based structure, that can be used to migrate DSpace content to another system that supports AIP's (DSpace or non-DSpace). DuraCloud is an extention of this as one could then backup the AIP to the cloud storage. Added by Tim Donohue (DuraSpace)
	Curation System , a framework for building and running tasks to help a Curator preserve and improve your repository contents. Tasks can be run on communities, collections, and items through the command line for cron-tasks, or through the User Interface for admins. The initial tasks available are:* Profile Bitstream Formats -- counts the number of bitstreams that share the same file format extension. Virus Scan -- inspect the bitstreams with a virus scanner (ClamAV) to detect if they contain viruses Check for Required Metadata -- checks that item metadata has values for all fields marked as required in the input-form Added by Richard Rodgers (MIT)
	Automated Unit Testing of core code -- helps the developers ensure that DSpace is as bug free and stable as possible. Unit Testing coupled with continuous integration on our bamboo server allows us to validate every change to the DSpace code base. Thus letting us know immediately if something changed broke another feature. Added by Pere Villega, a product of Google Summer of Code 2010 (mentor Stuart Lewis).
	Improved Google Scholar metadata exposure. Additional citation_ tags have been exposed to allow the Google Scholar crawler to find better associate repository metadata and PDF content. Added by Sands Fish, Richard Rodgers (MIT) and Peter Dietz (Ohio State)
	PowerPoint text extraction, for searching within PowerPoint slides Added by Keith Gilbertson (Georgia Tech)
	Top 10 Most Visited items list, available for the overall site.

Improvements

Performance and Scalability improvements. The code has been thoroughly analyzed by a suite of code quality tools to find blatant errors and omissions, more efficient ways of doing things, and implementing general best practices in the code. Additionally, numerous immeasurable performance gains have been made with regard to item ingestion and indexing speed. This was tested by adding a sample-data-generator, in which 400,000 items were added to a repository already containing 100,000 items, where by the total length of time to ingest items reduced to items per second, as opposed to seconds per item. Adding so many items would previously taken weeks or more, but the latest performance feat was done in 10 hours on a laptop. See more at DS-707. Many thanks go out to Graham Triggs (BioMed Central) for many sleepless weeks to vastly overhaul many weak links.

In addition to that, many other general improvements are:

Reducing the cost of browse prunes
SOLR is using autoCommit to reduce resource exhaustion
SOLR has an optimization function runnable from the command-line for crontasks to essentially "defragment" the solr index.
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

For a full list of all changes (new features, improvements, and bug fixes), please visit the Changes in DSpace 1.7.0 section of the new wiki-based DSpace Documentation.

Additionally, several bugs that were reported during Testathon have been fixed.

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].

The old way will no longer work, as the task scripts have been removed:

[dspace]/bin/create-administrator

The functionality is all performed by the centralized DSpace launcher:

[dspace]/bin/dspace create-administrator

Calling a command by its full classname still works by adding dsrun before the classname.

[dspace]/bin/dspace dsrun org.dspace.administer.CreateAdministrator

In Progress

Features that will receive more work before the final release of 1.7

*New localization - *We have made localization for Serbian language, need several days to finish quality evaluation..
- Bojan Suzic 10/27 -- according to documentation in Release Procedure it can be accepted before final release?
- Peter Dietz 11/07 -- Correct, language packs can be updated between releases, it is best to get it finished before the final release in December though.

Postponed for Next Release

The following projects were considered for 1.7, but were not stable enough to be included. They need further review and development from the stakeholders before they are suitable for widespread use, they may be considered for a future release of DSpace. The next release they will be reconsidered for is 1.8

REST API - Using standard web services to CRUD DSpace Objects. A product of previous GSOC.
SWORD Client for DSpace – (Robin Taylor, and possibly Richard Jones & Stuart Lewis)
- 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.
CGIProposal -- (Richard Rodgers/MIT)
- would allow for type-based submission processes (e.g. Theses/Dissertations could have different submission steps than articles/papers).
- 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)
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.
Rewrite of Creative Commons licensing (MIT)
- 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.