DataPortability for dummies

[richard]

An excerpt form the blog post I just pulled together regarding
Practical Portability...



The most difficult questions surrounding DataPortability are currently
those of understanding.

How do you explain to an end-user what DataPortability is, why they
might want it, and where they might get it?
How do you explain to a developer what DataPortability is, why they
might want it, and how they might achieve it?

Developers learn most effectively by developing something. Users learn
most effectively by using something.

For this reason we see the most effective way of promoting an
understanding of DataPortability as providing developers something to
develop that we know users will use.

To this end, we will be setting ourselves a real development target,
one that should satisfy both developer and user alike. We will be
developing the middleware required to create a single application
suite from a mix of open source solutions - using the DataPortability
Technical Blueprint as our guide.

Learning to develop for DataPortability without prior experience is
difficult though. Its initially a pretty steep learning curve, and
comes with it's own set of questions.

Where do you find reference implementations, and who'll walk you
through them?
Where do you find books and training materials on DataPortability
implementation?
Who'll help you with your own project?

Without answering these questions, you provide understanding for only
the privileged few.

We hope to provide something more, a path that anyone can take, an
introduction to coding for DataPortability - a DataPortability for
dummies.

Because of this Practical Portability will be made up of two equally
important pieces:

1. the leading edge work of collaborating on existing reference
implementations, or building them where they do not yet exist (the
traditional open source piece).
2. the follow-up work of turning the reference implementations into
training materials, classes etc (the less traditional open learning
piece)

Basically, we will pull together a reference implementation in
collaboration with others doing the same thing, and then use the
reference implementation as a syllabus for training up developers
looking to learn about DataPortability.

It's a little unusual in nature, but something very worthwhile, and
something I for one am excited to be a part of.