The new PCDM-based Hydra architecture — the Hydra::PCDM / Hydra::Works / CurationConcerns / Sufia stack (AKA “The Gobstopper”) — is now a year old, and needs to be evaluated in order to reach its next level of maturity. The scope of each gem and the distribution of features across this set of gems and their dependencies is a frequent topic of discussion among developers and stakeholders, and concerns around whether our stack has become too granular to maintain have also emerged: does our stack strike the right balance between architectural concerns and maintenance and other concerns, and if not, how ought it to change?
Questions about what the APIs and interfaces between the gems should be have also surfaced. This is a logical follow-on topic as we consider the scope and maturity of each gem, but should also help us to establish some best practices and reference patterns for developers of new or existing Hydra applications (e.g. Avalon, HydraDAM) who wish to build new applications upon or migrate existing applications to CurationConcerns or Sufia.
This group should be comprised of a balance of no more than ten architects, developers, and concerned managers/strategists who are using or aspire to use this application stack, who share and have opinions about these matters, and who can commit to the following deliverables and timeframe.
Deliverables will include:
A succinct description about our goals for architectural changes, including a summary of the community's reaction and the WG's recommendations
A high-level architecture diagram that is easy to understand and distribute
A more detailed write-up of the above, including at least a general distribution of features and the rationales / use cases that influence key decisions
Hydra Stack - The Hierarchy of Promises (updated for 2016)
These documents will be delivered via the Hydra wiki.
While the timeframe will ultimately depend on the members, drafts of the deliverables should be available for presentation at Hydra Connect 2016 (first week of October).
The group's sunset date is currently scheduled for November 1st, 2016.
The call for participation will be sent to hydra-partners@googlegroups.com, hydra-community@googlegroups.com, and hydra-tech@googlegroups.com.
A regular schedule for meetings will be set using Doodle once the membership is established. The initial plan will be to hold calls biweekly at a time to be determined.
Meetings, meeting minutes, deliverables, and milestones will be announced on hydra-partners@googlegroups.com, hydra-community@googlegroups.com, and hydra-tech@googlegroups.com.
We will set up a dedicated (not private, but topic-specific) Slack channel in the Project Hydra team for asynchronous communication. This should help us keep discussions focused and on topic: https://project-hydra.slack.com/messages/architecture/
Meetings will take place on BlueJeans
Meeting notes recording action items and provisional decisions will be in Google Docs, linked from the Hydra wiki
Note that to be a member of a Working Group, you must have have a CLA in place if you are committing code (not anticipated for SDMWG) and you must consent to release documentation under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Membership will be capped at (10) in order to keep scheduling and organization manageable.
Facilitators: Michael Giarlo (Stanford); Jon Stroop (Princeton)
Adam Wead (Penn State)
Justin Coyne (Stanford )
Trey Pendragon (Princeton)
Jeremy Friesen (Notre Dame)
Esmé Cowles (Princeton)
Lynette Rayle (Cornell)
Ben Armintor (Columbia)
Carrick Rogers (Indiana)
Michael Klein (Northwestern)
Legacy documents from the spring and summer 2015 work. Note that contradictory decisions may have been made since these documents were last used. They may still prove as useful reference points, e.g. for enumeration of features.
Other reference docs that may be of use.