What is the status of Akara?

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

Some days ago we talked about the status of Amara. I must create now a
new REST app. We're doing extraction/scraping of data with Amara, but
we don't know if you recommend us to use Akara for our web services.

Uche, what's the status of Akara? Do you recommned us to use it? or
better test other fameworks? We did some little apps with akara in the
past and worked fine. Cherrypy, bottle and tornado are other
candidates. Suggestions?

Regards,


-- luismiguel  (@lmorillas)

[Uche Ogbuji]

Folks, this answer is relevant to this thread, and the other ones on Amara.

This week has been crazy as I battle deadlines and prepare for a big trip to Geneva, to present and refine a system we're preparing for the WHO. And yes, that software uses Amara and Akara. I just haven't had the time to work on docs as I'd promised, nor even to keep up with email, as you can see from my late response here.

The bottom line is that unfortunately, It's been really hard to find the time to do the usual project leader stuff for Amara and Akara, including advocacy. My time is far too packed in *using* them, including in some very high profile projects.  See:

 * http://zepheira.com/2011/11/library-of-congress-launches-recollection-as-viewshare-org/

 * http://hacklibschool.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/viewshare/

 * http://zepheira.com/2012/04/zepheira-selected-to-revamp-key-world-health-organization-web-site/

So if the ultimate test of any software (open source or no) is "did it scratch the creator's itch?" then Amara and Akara have passed that with flying colors, and there is a bright future for these. But that's only my perspective (and maybe also that of Mark Baker, who also uses Akara heavily). That said, I freely admit these projects need work. Amara needs work on tests and docs. Akara's tests are in pretty good shape, but it needs help with docs. I'm seriously considering the port of both of these to both PyPy and Python 3.3+, the former because I think it will allow us to eliminate the C code and still boost performance, and the latter because Unicode support has finally been revamped (*long* overdue in Python). But even this is a tricky matter considering that PyPy is inching towards Python 3.x support, but not quite there yet.

So I think the only way I can answer the question about whether anyone else should use Amara and Akara is to say:

I use them. They work very well for me. I acknowledge they also still need work (and I'm grateful for any help in that work), and I am still committed to them, both in minor fixes and improvements as well as in major evolution, but I'm dealing with limited bandwidth to donate to open source software. You'll have to make your own decision based on that input.

I'm sure everyone will have dozens of suggestions for breaking the logjam, but  please couple any such points with concrete ideas that are compatible with the reality of my limited time, for now (as a company Zepheira is working on developments that might help my workload in the future).

I do appreciate the interest of all you good folks paying attention.

--Uche

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--
Uche Ogbuji                       http://uche.ogbuji.net
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[Chimezie Ogbuji]

FYI. I just finished using Amara, Akara, D3, jQuery, and rdflib on a
data tracking project. The experience was very rewarding and
educational for me and I hope to write it about on our weblog and this
may help wrt documentation and advocacy of Akara. There were quite a
few undocumented hurdles I had to climb through and I hope documenting
these will be useful for others who wish to use it in this way
(especially those who wish to use Akara as a web framework underlying
XSLT as the primary template language ,RDF as the storage layer, and
XML as the intermediate representation format for storage).

So, stay tuned to Copia.

:)

[Sylvain Hellegouarch]

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 4:40 PM, Uche Ogbuji <uc...@ogbuji.net> wrote:

Folks, this answer is relevant to this thread, and the other ones on Amara.

This week has been crazy as I battle deadlines and prepare for a big trip to Geneva, to present and refine a system we're preparing for the WHO. And yes, that software uses Amara and Akara. I just haven't had the time to work on docs as I'd promised, nor even to keep up with email, as you can see from my late response here.

The bottom line is that unfortunately, It's been really hard to find the time to do the usual project leader stuff for Amara and Akara, including advocacy. My time is far too packed in *using* them, including in some very high profile projects.  See:

 * http://zepheira.com/2011/11/library-of-congress-launches-recollection-as-viewshare-org/

 * http://hacklibschool.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/viewshare/

 * http://zepheira.com/2012/04/zepheira-selected-to-revamp-key-world-health-organization-web-site/

So if the ultimate test of any software (open source or no) is "did it scratch the creator's itch?" then Amara and Akara have passed that with flying colors, and there is a bright future for these. But that's only my perspective (and maybe also that of Mark Baker, who also uses Akara heavily). That said, I freely admit these projects need work. Amara needs work on tests and docs. Akara's tests are in pretty good shape, but it needs help with docs. I'm seriously considering the port of both of these to both PyPy and Python 3.3+, the former because I think it will allow us to eliminate the C code and still boost performance, and the latter because Unicode support has finally been revamped (*long* overdue in Python). But even this is a tricky matter considering that PyPy is inching towards Python 3.x support, but not quite there yet.

So I think the only way I can answer the question about whether anyone else should use Amara and Akara is to say:

I use them. They work very well for me. I acknowledge they also still need work (and I'm grateful for any help in that work), and I am still committed to them, both in minor fixes and improvements as well as in major evolution, but I'm dealing with limited bandwidth to donate to open source software. You'll have to make your own decision based on that input.

I'm sure everyone will have dozens of suggestions for breaking the logjam, but  please couple any such points with concrete ideas that are compatible with the reality of my limited time, for now (as a company Zepheira is working on developments that might help my workload in the future).

Thanks Uche for the feedback. On a personal note, I will continue enjoying using Amara as I have for so long. On a professional note, it may be slightly more difficult advocating for it with limited work happening on, even more as long as it's officially tagged as alpha. Note that I would vouch for it but my company is ever so prudent when it comes to committing to using resources (they do understand what is OSS but, you know how that works unfortunately, they take and hardly give back).

Enjoy the trip to Europe ;)

--
- Sylvain
http://www.defuze.org
http://twitter.com/lawouach

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

2012/5/5 Uche Ogbuji <uc...@ogbuji.net>:

It's very interesting, Uche. These are the kind of things I wanted to
read :) I's a lot of time without hearing about akara and I was
worried.

I'll try to use akara too and I'll tell you how our app is going.

My plans are to give some time to Amara/Akara projects this summer, so
I could work on docs and test and maybe (Sylvain? ) Amara could grow
to a beta release.

Regards,

-- luismiguel

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

2012/5/5 Chimezie Ogbuji <chim...@gmail.com>:

> FYI.  I just finished using Amara, Akara, D3, jQuery, and rdflib on a
> data tracking project.  The experience was very rewarding and
> educational for me and I hope to write it about on our weblog and this
> may help wrt documentation and advocacy of Akara.  There were quite a
> few undocumented hurdles I had to climb through and I hope documenting
> these will be useful for others who wish to use it in this way
> (especially those who wish to use Akara as a web framework underlying
> XSLT as the primary template language ,RDF as the storage layer, and
> XML as the intermediate representation format for storage).
>
> So, stay tuned to Copia.
>
> :)
>

Cool, Chime,

I'll read that blog. Very interesting architecture!.

-- lm

[Sylvain Hellegouarch]

My plans are to give some time to Amara/Akara projects this summer, so
I could work on docs and test and maybe (Sylvain? ) Amara could grow
to a beta release.

I'm wondering what is the rough status of the test suite of Amara? 

[Luis Miguel Morillas]

2012/5/5 Sylvain Hellegouarch <s...@defuze.org>:

>>
>> My plans are to give some time to Amara/Akara projects this summer, so
>> I could work on docs and test and maybe (Sylvain? ) Amara could grow
>> to a beta release.
>>
>
>
> I'm wondering what is the rough status of the test suite of Amara?
>

These are the latest notes I remember [1] I can review the status in a
few weeks. And maybe when Uche come from Europe, we can plan a new
calendar to improve the test suite.


[1] http://wiki.xml3k.org/Amara/Developer_notes/Test_migration

Saludos,

-- luismiguel  (@lmorillas)

> --
> - Sylvain
> http://www.defuze.org
> http://twitter.com/lawouach
>

[Pigneri, Rocco]

Dear Uche,

 

Before we get too much in the weeds about schedules and goals and resources, I just want to point out two things that this project has going for it.

 

First, there is already a lot of energy around this project.  In addition to many people using this code in production, one person is adding HTML processing and web scraping support, and Uche himself is talking about a port to PyPy and Python 3.3+.  These are huge undertakings for such a small community.  Building this level of commitment and excitement is one of the hardest things in growing a software community.

 

Second, in getting volunteer work, you usually have to provide (very) little structure in order to get a large return.  Capturing the development energy outlined above in a few small paragraphs in the Progress section of the website could bring out a lot of developer help from companies or individuals who initially were scared off by the alpha designation.  A few minutes spent describing in broad terms what help we are looking for could pay off in spades.  Since it’s such little work, it’s worth a shot before we worry ourselves with really major changes to this project.

 

Just some thoughts,

 

Rocco