CubicWeb roadmap meeting on July 3rd, 2014

The Logilab team holds a roadmap meeting every two months to plan its CubicWeb development effort. The previous roadmap meeting was in May 2014.

Here is the report about the July 3rd, 2014 meeting. Christophe de Vienne (Unlish) and Dimitri Papadopoulos (CEA) joined us to express their concerns and discuss the future of CubicWeb.

Versions

Version 3.17

This version is stable but old and maintainance will continue only as long as some customers will be willing to pay for it (current is 3.17.15 with 3.17.16 in development).

Version 3.18

This version is stable and maintained (current is 3.18.5 with 3.18.6 in development).

Version 3.19

This version was published at the end of April and has now been tested on our internal servers. It includes support for Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and a heavy refactoring that modifies sessions and sources to lay the path for CubicWeb 4.

For details read the release notes or the list of tickets for CubicWeb 3.19.0. Current is 3.19.2

Version 3.20

This version is under development. It will try to reduce as much as possible the stock of patches in the state "reviewed", "awaiting review" and "in progress". If you have had something in the works that has not been accepted yet, please ready it for 3.20 and get it merged.

It should still include the work done for CWEP-002 (computed attributes and relations.

For details read list of tickets for CubicWeb 3.20.0.

Version 3.21 (or maybe 4.0?)

Removal of the dbapi, merging of Connection and ClientConnection, CWEP-003 (adding a FROM clause to RQL).

Cubes

Cubes published over the past two months

New cubes

  • cubicweb-frbr: Cube providing a schema based on FRBR entities
  • cubicweb-clinipath
  • cubicweb-fastimport

CWEPs

Here is the status of open CubicWeb Evolution Proposals:

CWEP-0002 only missing a bit of migration support, to be finished soon for inclusion in 3.20.

CWEP-0003 has been reviewed and is waiting for a bit of reshaping that should occurs soon. It's targeted for 3.21.

New CWEPs are expected to be written for clarifying the API of the _cw object, supporting persistent sessions and improving the performance of massive imports.

Work in progress

Design

The new logo is now published in the 3.19 line. David showed us his experimentation that modernize a forge's ui with a bit of CSS. There is still a bit of pressure on the bootstrap side though, as it still rely on heavy monkey-patching in the cubicweb-bootstrap cube.

Data import

Also, Dimitry expressed is concerns with the lack of proper data import API. We should soon have some feedback from Aurelien's cubicweb-fastimport experimentation, which may be an answer to Dimitry's need. In the end, we somewhat agreed that there were different needs (eg massive-no-consistency import vs not-so-big-but-still-safe), that cubicweb.dataimport was an attempt to answer them all and then cubicweb-dataio and cubicweb-fastimport were more specific responses. In the end we may reasonably hope that an API will emerge.

Removals

On his way to persistent sessions, Aurélien made a huge progress toward silence of warnings in the 3.19 tests. dbapi has been removed, ClientConnection / Connection merged. We decided to take some time to think about the recurring task management as it is related to other tricky topics (application / instance configuration) and it's not directly related to persistent session.

Rebasing on Pyramid

Last but not least, Christophe demonstrated that CubicWeb could basically live with Pyramid. This experimentation will be pursued as it sounds very promising to get the good parts from the two framework.

Agenda

Logilab's next roadmap meeting will be held at the beginning of september 2014 and Christophe and Dimitri were invited.