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Meeting 78 – 18 September 2014

Agenda

  • Actions from meeting 77 (Steve)
  • ICAT development (Steve)
  • An eclipse based ICAT editor  (Christophe)
  • IDS development (Steve)
  • TopCAT development (Wayne)
  • IJP development (Brian R)
  • Issues from ICAT production deployments (Any)
  • AOB (Any)

Notes

Apologies: Milan and Alistair

Present: Wayne, Steve, David, Rolf, Andy, Kevin, Christophe, Brian M and Brian R

Unfortunately Anton Telechev and Matt Viljoen were both unable to attend because of problems with hangouts. I hope to understand what went wrong so that we get it right next time.

  • Action 77.0 – Steve has added a couple of people to the icatgroup list – including Andy.
  • Action 77.1 – Steve updated the road map as agreed at the last meeting. The main change was to include less in icat.server 4.4.0. so that it could be released sooner. This had been advertised. One person said he was happy and nobody opposed it so the word “Draft” has been removed.
  • Action 75.1 – This action relating to topcatadmin is no longer relevant as we are now thinking about TopCAT 2
  • Action 75.4 – Andy has prepared a set of Use Cases relevant to TopCAT these should be publicised very soon.
  • Steve reported that progress with icat.server 4.4.0 is good. He has two major things to solve – “the DISTINCT problem” which was a hack introduced  to avoid multiple copies of the same entity being returned when someone was authorized by more than one route and authz to include projections. As the former is a bug rather than an enhancement it will be tackled first. A release is expected in about a month.
  • Christophe presented an Eclipse based ICAT editor. This has functionality conceptually similar to that of ICE but is much more pleasant to use and requires no installation. He had a problem with an earlier version with huge combo box menus but has been able to introduce a filtering mechanism to avoid this problem. It will be made generally available very shortly.
  • Steve reported that updates to the various IDS components had been made he referred to the release notes such as those for the server and for the client . There was a brief discussion on the limit imposed by the IDS client on the size of URLs that it will send as GET calls. This may result in a bug report.
  • Wayne stated that TopCAT 1.12.0 had been released. The alternative layout proposals from Anton were discussed however as mentioned above he was unfortunately not connected in. Anton’s diagrams seem to show support of only one ICAT rather than multiple ICATs. Wayne liked the generally simpler views that Anton presented and will incorporate what he considers to be improvements from Anton. Ideas which are not accepted will be discussed. Wayne will also make sure that the use cases from Andy are accommodated by the design. There was a brief discussion about the “shopping cart”. Wayne explained that for single data files, datasets or investigations they could be downloaded immediately without using the cart. Andy was interested in having some visualization features if practical and also being able to see more of the information that is available in ICAT.
  • Brian R described the work he had been doing on the IJP writing a batch interface to talk to Platform LSF. The IJP has been modified to talk to a standardised batch interface of which we now have three. Andy said that they had potential users but they would need to have support for OAR
  • Under AOB, Andy asked how to produce a robust ICAT deployment. Steve said that since icat.server 4.3.3 multiple servers could communicate with one database but they must be correctly configured. There is also the issue of configuring glassfish to make good use of an Oracle RAC

system.

Actions

ITEM DESCRIPTION ASSIGNED
78.0 Release Eclipse based ICAT editor Christophe
78.1 Merge Anton’s material and try to satisfy TopCAT uses cases from Andy. Wayne
78.2 Make sure that install scripts and/or documentation includes configuration of glassfish for Oracle RAC system Kevin
75.4 Submit TopCAT Use Cases/requirements Andy
74.0 Look into JDBC connector resilience with Wildfly Steve
61.1 Put the simple ICAT browser into contrib when it is ready Condie
60.3 Finalise a release of IJP and send a note to the mailing list Steve