#web-meeting: Tuesday 2012-June-12 (14:00 UTC)

[Jocelyn Fiat]

UPDATE: my previous announce is corrected, and the meeting will be on tuesday the 12th (and not anymore the 14th)

You can follow discussion on previous thread, but be aware the date changed.

Check this link for date and time in your timezone: http://goo.gl/RKwvI

EWF's G+ page: https://plus.google.com/110650349519032194479/ 

(I will try to write a small note about G+ hangout, but if any one has trouble, we can always use webex)

-- Jocelyn

[Jocelyn Fiat]

Hi all

The meeting is done.

Some people were not able to participate due to audio trouble, vacation, or other events, so we were not that many this time (4 people), but we had interesting discussion on Hypermedia API.

It seems G+ is not an option for everyone, so we'll use webex in the future, and for time to time.

However we don't exclude the option to use G+ hangout to report progress (many announcements, and slides, to that we can broadcast it easily), and eventually attract new users this way.

Here are quick minutes on the meeting:

# Structure of EWF / Release

For now, EWF looks more like a collection of libraries, and a few libraries could be interested to be reused outside the scope of EWF  (for instance URI template, http_client, ... ).

So it would make sense to split the main EWF repository into several git repositories.

With git it is possible to "include" other git repository within one single repository, so we will try to find a nice way to split, but still provide a "EWF" repository including everything needed to build EWF application.

In the meantime, we will work to include EWF's libraries into EiffelStudio's libraries, so that the EWF code is available easily with next Eiffel Studio's release.

And then, we'll see with Eiffel Hub, on to integrate it inside Eiffel Hub easily as well.

# Future development

## Graphviz server

We decided to work on a graphviz server as an example, it would be a simple example to demonstrate REST Hypermedia API with EWF.

An example, but still a potential useful service to generate PNG, SVG, PDF, ... output from a graphviz text description of graph (see http://graphviz.org/ )

We will experiment first using Collection JSON, and then later also with HAL  (see http://amundsen.com/media-types/collection/ and https://raw.github.com/mikekelly/hal-rfc/master/draft-kelly-json-hal-00.txt )

This example will also be the opportunity to provide component to help supporting caching, logging, and security.

So this simple application will lead the future development of EWF (focus on REST, Hypermedia API, logging, caching, security).

And hopefully, when this is done, we'll have a nice example or even a nice useful web application, and more important new component to handle the common need of web servers.

## Eiffel Web Nino

There are also important work to achieve on Nino: 

- add support for persistent connection

- add better support for concurrency  (thread pool, and also a SCOOP version)

- logging, configuration, ...

Those tasks are not critical for EWF, since we can always rely on apache, IIS, and others thanks to the CGI, FastCGI connectors.

But having a strong Nino would have several advantages

- having a http server written in Eiffel, and that could be embedded easily, or used easily without having to configure any 3rd party server

- being able to debug within Eiffel Studio

- being able to automate tests on EWF (we already use Nino and http_client to test part of EWF thanks to the autotest tool, and also within a jenkins environment)

# Contributions

We are happy to receive contributions and we thanks the current contributors, we will start integrating them shortly after the first release

As you might guess we have many projects/tasks for the future development, and we can think of many other possible additions/improvements.

So we'll write down descriptions for potential projects, so that people can see if they want to contribute on specific tasks. 

If students are interested, we will be happy to help them with Eiffel, EWF, and everything around this project.

If your enterprise is interested by using EWF, and also contribute to it, we will also be happy to collaborate with you to improve EWF, and make your user experience the best possible.

And if you are not into those 2 categories, you are also welcome to contribute.

Feedback, suggestions, bug reports, documentation, tutorial, video, or just talk about EWF, any contribution will make us and our users happy.

So we'll communicate soon about those projects description, and don't hesitate to suggest projects as well.

----

Those minutes does not report in depth the technical discussion we had, but if you want more details, just ask

Talk to you soon,

-- Jocelyn for the EWF team.

ps: don't hesitate to ask for web meetings on any topic. It is easy to turn one of our frequent team meetings, into official web meetings.