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Meeting 83 – 26 February 2015

Agenda

  • Actions from meeting 82 (Steve)
  • ICAT development (Steve)
  • ICAT Manager (Christophe)
  • Python-ICAT (Rolf)
  • IDS development (Steve)
  • TopCAT development (Wayne)
  • IJP development (Brian R)
  • Installation (Steve)
  • Issues from ICAT production deployments (Any)
  • 2015 F2F Meeting and Steering Group Meeting at DLS (Steve, Andy and Alun)
  • AOB (Any)

Notes

Present: Condie, Steve, Christophe, Brian R, Rolf, Tom, Shelley, Nick

Apologies: Kevin Knowles, Matt, Kevin P, Wayne, Andy, Milan

  • Action 82.0: Steve is planning to proceed with development of the enhancement focusing on what suits the needs of ELETTRA then add further functionality for other sites at a later date if required.
  • Action 82.1: This issue has been marked as bug 150 and will no longer be tracked here.
  • Action 82.2: See under IDS development
  • Action 82.3: Layout mockups currently being updated by Wayne to match latest inputs from Diamond. Once the updates have been completed the layout mockups will be circulated to all interested parties for approval.
  • Action 82.4: After a lot of communication with BitRock Steve has established the issue to be caused by the way that Python handles subprocesses within Windows. Steve will add calls to the installer the are normally handled by the python setup script to overcome this issue. Currently the only component affected is the ids.storage_file.
  • Action 82.5: The F2F meeting agenda has been released and the mailing list has been informed.
  • Action 81.1: Currently in preparation and will be circulated prior to the F2F meeting.
  • Steve has begun development on ICAT 4.5.0 with lucene based searching for use by TopCAT.
  • ICAT 4.4.0 has been found to not support selects of the form “SELECT a.b FROM…” where b is not a simple attribute. This was never documented as a feature and therefore has never been tested, however it used to work in versions of ICAT prior to 4.4.0. This has been fixed and tested in 4.5.0 and so far appears to be successful.
  • Steve may possibly release ICAT 4.5.0 without the lucene calls to address bug fixes in 4.4.0. The TopCAT matching lucene calls would then be delayed to version 4.6.0. Everyone was happy with this approach.
  • A new version of ICAT Manager is to be released in the upcoming month. There will be some small additional features and bug fixes but no major changes to functionality.
  • A new version (0.7.0) of Python-ICAT has been released. There is mostly only one change: a new module icat.query with a class Query have been added.  This class can be used to build ICAT search expressions.  Instances of the class may be used in place of search expression strings where appropriate.Using the Query class can improve readability of your Python code. Currently no plans to add new features to Python-ICAT or bug fixes required.
  • Version 1.3.1 of the IDS has been released. This includes a fix to a bug causing file handled remaining open for individually downloaded files.
  • Version 1.3.1 of the ids.storage_file has been released. This includes a fix to to a bug in the algorithm that chooses which files to archive.
  • Steve is to provide a new IDS bug fix soon for an issue related the file checking. Currently the file that holds the last ID checked can be corrupted.
  • Steve, in conjunction with DLS, are currently investigating various methods for alternate download method for the IDS. One option being a new component that makes calls to the IDS via the use of the getLink call and then pushing the data via a choice of mechanisms. This may be one component or several that make use a shared library. Another option is a client that can be run by the user that is user installable and can run in the background. Steve to circulate diagrams outline each of the possibilities.
  • Steve found an issue when attempting to provide logging through the IDS plugin as it interferes with the main IDS logging. Steve suggested changing logging framework  as Log4J interacts badly with Glassfish. Tom stated that the new logging framework would be required to provide daily rolling log files as well as the ability to set the maximum size of a log file. Steve is going to test the use of the Java Util logging framework on the ids.storage_file and this will be discussed further at the F2F meeting.
  • Agile development to be begin soon for TopCAT v2. Tom mentioned inviting the interested parties to the sprint reviews to get feedback on development.
  • A new release of the ICAT installer that is compatible with Windows will soon be released by Steve. Sample data will also be offered by the

installer.

Actions

ITEM DESCRIPTION ASSIGNED
83.0 Circulate diagrams to showcase solutions to alternate download protocols for IDS Steve
83.1 Invite customer representatives from interested facilities to TopCAT v2 sprint reviews Tom
83.2 Finalize TopCAT v2 layout mockups and circulate Wayne
82.0 LDAP enhancement to work with a functional ID Steve
82.2 Alternate download protocols for IDS Steve
81.0 Report bug in eclipselink Steve
81.1 Circulate response to PaNdata document Steve
74.0 Look into JDBC connector resilience with Wildfly Steve
61.1 Put the simple ICAT browser into contrib when ready Condie