EPrints4 Roadmap

Some general ideas for the development of the next major release of EPrints.

Main Objectives

• Separation of the Core API and UI (/rendering) components

• Remove the spaghetti code (esp (1) rendering methods (2) Dataobj-Metafield relations)

• Drop support for internal search in favour of specialist tools such as Xapian or Solr - we might however need to keep some aspects of the internal search (cf List/data retrieval) for exact matching - perhaps that's more a (SQL) "QueryBuilder" than a (user) search.

• Drop support for Windows

• Implement object locking at the core level (for any objects, perhaps without using database fields at all)

• code normalisation:
  • use new class name (e.g. EPrints::Session => EPrints::Repository)
  • use "new way" of doing things (e.g. EPrints::Dataobj::X->new(12) => repo->dataset( 'x' )->dataobj(12))
  • remove v2.x features deprecated in v3+ (cf. EPrints::BackCompatibility)

• define clear API for core functions (e.g. Database, object handling) and for UI purposes. The API must present a unique way of doing something.

Core

• Revisit Apache request Handler (lots of hard-coded paths, many obsolete paths)

• Remove EPrints::Session from anywhere in favour of EPrints::Repository

• Test using memcached (http://code.google.com/p/memcached/) - Cache::Memcached::Fast to cache data objects, perhaps could work to cache XML fragments too.

• Use Multipart rather than Compound - Compound creates 1 table per subfield whilst Multipart creates 1 column per subfield.