Hi all,
Here is an update on IRMIS3 development.
* More mail!
For those that are interested to be more in touch with development,
we have setup an e-mail list at [email protected]
. Please subscribe if you are interested in more blah blah blah on IRMIS3. It’s
not very high traffic, but I make it a point to discuss/alert of important changes.
(https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=226514)
* Release early, release often
We have setup a release schedule of once a monthish. For
numbering convention we chose to do what MySQL does: start a branch (3.0 in our
case) keep releasing versions (3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2) as alpha, until they become
beta, until they become stable. Today we released 3.0.1-alpha (changelog at http://irmis.sourceforge.net/history.html)
while 3.0.0-alpha was pretty much what we had at the EPICS collaboration
meeting.
* Properties, properties everywhere
Among the thing we worked on is support for generic
key/value pair properties on components and component types. This will allow sites
to put their site specific ju… ehm… their very valuable information
within the database without requiring continuous modifications of the database/service/API.
This can be used, for example, to tag which component types require NRTL
inspection, which component have passed it, the GPS location of a component, the
location of the manual for a component type, and so on. It’s up to each
site to decide how to use them. This also gives a sandbox for people to play
and extend IRMIS, and if there are extensions that are of general interest that
they could be “oh so much better” with native support, we would
plan a transition.
The main focus for the next few releases is finalizing the
DB schema, protocol, Java API and applications for Component types, Components
and Cables. Which means that we are going through the (hopefully) last few
schema changes (sorry).
Thanks,
Gabriele