[Koha] What's on in Koha devel #6 - Special post hk16

[Jonathan Druart]

Hello librarians and developers,

On the same way as my previous email, I think it would be useful for
everybody to get feedback on what was going on during the hackfest in
Marseille last week.
I plan to send the next "What's on in Koha devel" emails to both koha
and koha-devel lists, if nobody disagrees (someone?).
I think it would be helpful for developers not heavily involved in the
development as well as techie librarians.

Here are the different topics on which the developers have focused
during this hackfest (as far I am aware of!):

= Refactoring =
Thanks to testers and QAers, a lot of things have moved in this area.
Only 2 are waiting for QA and 9 are waiting to be pushed, and lot of
others have been pushed!
I will have to refill our bug tracker with new patches soon :)

Unfortunately the move of the biblioitems.marcxml field to another
table (bug 17196) did not interest anybody. It's however our first
step toward new interesting features and don't necessarily depend on
marc to store the records.

= Elastic search =
The mapping configuration page (bug 14899) have been pushed during
this hackfest alongside some other bug fixes.

A couple of UNIMARC users have submitted a patch for the authority
mappings (bug 17373), now we need a couple of others to validate it!

= Mana =
Morgan presented us Mana and how it would help librarians to share
data (subscriptions infos at the moment but could be extended to
reports for instance), see bug 17373 if you are interested by testing
these patches and/or understanding how it works.

= RESTful API & ReactJS =
The developer team works in the aim to submit a proposal for a full
integration of our RESTful API, from the objects to the templates.
We wanted to work all together on this problematic to show the
community how easy and clean it can be.
That means that we had a lot of passionated and intense discussions,
as you can imagine, to reach a consensus on tiny things (variable's
name) or big architecture problematics to simplify all the stack code.

Basically we tried to get the simplest component as possible (the
Koha::Cities modules and admin/cities.tt template) to make it an
example to follow.
For the RESTful API, all what we have is on bug 17428 (and
dependencies). Yes, we know, it does not look like a lot for a whole
week of work, but we needed to agree ;) The idea of having a small
example gave us enough time to have a look at several things like
exceptions, inconsistencies in our existing implementation, etc.

About ReactJS, Kyle showed us how it could work on a small example
(bug 17297) and then on a more complete example using the RESTful API
endpoints (https://github.com/bywatersolutions/bywater-koha-devel/commits/cities_editor)

If you are a developer or interested on this topic you should
definitely have a look at these patches to know what could be the
future of Koha ;)
No decision has been taken so far and everything is here for
discussion and example.

During the next meeting, we will certainly talk about some minor but
important details like "should PUT accept the id in the body". Stay
tunes!


Please complete this list if I forget something!

The next dev meeting is on November 9th and the time has been set to
19UTC but is flexible.
I'd like to try something new and get an answer to this survey:
https://framadate.org/3dAEB8zqQLzzTptD from people wanting to attempt
the dev meetings.
The goal is not to get only 1 time slot but 2, in order to alternate
between them. I repeat, you should only answer if you plan to attempt
dev meetings :)

Cheers,
Jonathan