Hydra Technical Update June 2011

Overview

This is part of the June 2011 Hydra Partners Meeting Agenda and Notes

Substantial growth
Worked very hard towards providing

easy adoption path
steady upgrade path
strong support for large, distributed dev community

Recognized patterns
Moving towards providing shared functionality in generic, flexible ways while supporting/encouraging development of specialized, full-stack Hydra heads.

Successes

Adoption: hydrangea & 2 heads, 2 teams w/ 5 devs TO 15 heads, > 8 teams, ~ 20 devs
Components Stabilized with regular release cycles
Recognizing patterns & Refining Hydra Head plugin

Challenges

Growing Developer Community
Rails3
UI, Accessibility & Usability – How to achieve consistency & quality with many developers creating many hydra heads?
Hydrangea End of Life ... what to provide, then, as baseline demo for hydra-head plugin?

Priorities

Easy adoption path
Stable upgrade path
Easy contribution path
Refining hydra-head plugin, "putting a box around the distinct functional areas"
UI, Accessibility & Usability – what conventions to apply, how to support them, and how to enforce them

What's Next

Rails3
Refining hydra head plugin to provide functionality at a more generic level
Figuring out & implementing UI plan