Future of EFES

[Gabriel Bodard]

Dear colleagues,

I want to open a conversation, speculative at this point, about the medium- to long-term future of EFES as a platform.

As many of you know, when we came up with the idea for EFES, we based it on the existing TEI XML publication platform Kiln, on the assumption that we would be piggybacking on an active developer community, that we could inherit improvements to code from both Kiln and Cocoon (and possibly Sesame, Solr, etc.), that fixing of major bugs or compatibility issues would be in the interest of the Kiln developers, there would be natural collaborators for future projects (as well of course as it being a user-friendly, easy to customise and develop platform).

As time has passed, both technical features of the underlying infrastructure and the development environments around us have evolved, which may mean that an EFES based on Cocoon is no longer the most effective solution. (And the project is six years old, so I'd be shocked if things hadn't evolved!)

One option on the table would be to rewrite the core functionality of EFES (which is precisely the customizability and user-friendliness) using another underlying infrastructure, for example ExistDB. People smarter than me tell me this is a much more tractable undertaking than I would have guessed…

But does anyone have any other ideas? Objections? Suggestions? Defence of the status quo? More radical revision or redesign to propose?

Many thanks, and all best,

Gabby

==
Dr Gabriel BODARD (he/him)
Reader in Digital Classics

Institute of Classical Studies / Digital Humanities Research Hub

University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
 
E: Gabriel...@sas.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 78628752 

 
Especially at the moment, I may email at odd hours of the day and night/days of the week. I do not ever expect a reply outside of your working hours.

[Martina Filosa]

Dear Gabby,

Thank you for this inspiring email!

I think we should definitely start a conversation on this topic. I see some pros and some cons in changing EFES' underlying structure:

Pro: Cocoon -- We have all, at some point and on different levels, been struggling with Cocoon. 

Con: Backward compatibility -- Right now, EFES-based projects are flourishing (and I'm not just talking about Cologne-based ones, of course), and we would need to see if by changing the underlying structure of the platform we could ensure backward compatibility to what has already been done and to all the already published projects that are sometimes less than a year old.

But I am here way out of my comfort zone and would really appreciate some feedback and input from the community!

All the very best from Cologne,

m.

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Martina Filosa, M.A.

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin

ANR/DFG DigiByzSeal - VolkswagenStiftung DiBS

Universität zu Köln
Institut für Altertumskunde
Abteilung Byzantinistik und Neugriechische Philologie
Albertus-Magnus-Platz

D-50923 Köln

martina...@uni-koeln.de