Hydra-in-a-Box development ramps up

[Hannah Frost]

Greetings, and here’s a Hydra-in-a-Box update!

Design Phase nearly complete

We are now winding down the project's Design Phase. This phase involved several months of in-depth analysis of the current landscape and use of repository offerings. The information is feeding directly into the requirements and design of Hydra-in-a-Box, leveraging the experiences of our community and building on the best of current and forward-facing technologies. You can read about some of what we have learned and decided in our blog posts: http://hydrainabox.projecthydra.org/blog.html. 

Development starts

With the design coming together, naturally we turn to application and service development. The Hydra-in-a-Box development team, based at Stanford Libraries, has been formed and officially launched its work, planned to extend for at least one year.

The team’s members are Joe Atzberger, Chris Beer, Justin Coyne, Tom Cramer, Erin Fahy, Gary Geisler, Mike Giarlo, Rob Sanderson, Drew Winget, and myself. Here’s a summary of our initial work, as posted last week to the Hydra community list by Mike Giarlo, Technical Manager.

We are organizing our work in one-week sprints, and will have open demos on Friday mornings (Pacific time) for those who are interested in keeping up with our progress. We also will be recording these demos. Links to the live demos and recordings will be shared on community mailing lists. (We anticipate that the demos will begin in two weeks.)

Our first milestone is June 1st, 2016 -- in time for a demonstration of Hydra-in-a-Box at Open Repositories 2016 -- at which time we endeavor to deploy an application based on Sufia 7 to the cloud (Amazon Web Services), which:

* supports the management of top-priority content types: image-based works and generic multi-file works (think IR-like use cases)
* offers a user interface for dynamic configuration of the application (without having to touch Ruby or YAML files)
* provides an administrative dashboard with reporting widgets
* allows for batch import of content and metadata

Our tickets for the above feature work are viewable on Waffle [1] and our code will be in the following Hydra Labs repository [2].

In our first sprint, the team is orienting itself by installing Sufia locally and reviewing the backlog of tickets leading to the Sufia 7 release. (Note that next week is a down week for us, with the team actively involved in LDCX, a Hydra-in-a-Box project meeting, and the Hydra Developer Congress and Hydra Power Steering.) You can see this work in Sufia's Waffle [3].

We’ll share our weekly demos with the Hydra community listservs, and we'll post regular project updates with our monthly progress message to hydra-community. If you are interested to know more about the overall project, check out our project website [4]. 

If you'd like to contribute development cycles to Hydra-in-a-Box (including the push to release Sufia 7, part of which is implementing the first round of requirements from the Sufia User Interface Working Group), feel free to drop us a note at hybox-...@googlegroups.com, or ping me privately, and we will be happy to coordinate the effort to include developers from other institutions in this work.

[1] https://waffle.io/projecthydra-labs/hybox
[2] https://github.com/projecthydra-labs/hybox
[3] https://waffle.io/projecthydra/sufia?milestone=7.0.0
[4] http://hydrainabox.projecthydra.org/

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting much more on the design and development. Keep your eyes on the project blog and this group list for that news!

Questions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to be in touch with us. 

Best regards,

Hannah

—
Hannah Frost
Product Manager, Hydra-in-a-Box
Stanford University Libraries
hfr...@stanford.edu

http://hydrainabox.projecthydra.org
@HydraInABox