Agenda:

• Actions from meeting 107 (Kevin)
• Component development
  • ICAT (Steve)
  • ICAT Manager (Alex)
  • Python-icat (Rolf)
  • IDS (Steve)
    • FUSE
    • PollCat (Frazer)
    • SmartClient (Steve)
    • IDAV (Tom Gowland)
  • TopCAT (Jody)
  • IJP (Brian R/Alastair)
  • ICAT Dashboard (Tom Gowland)
  • Multi-container support (Steve)
  • Installation (Steve)
• Review of website (Stuart)
• Next F2F Meeting
• Issues from ICAT production deployments (Any)
• AOB (Any)

Present: Kevin, Brian Ritchie, Tom Gowland, Jody, Stuart, Rolf, Peter, Andy

Apologies: Milan, Steve (who had produced written reports for the meeting)

Actions from 107

Item	Description	Assigned
102.1	Send message to icatgroup explaining proposed modification to plugin interface for IDS locking	Rolf
102.2	Produce new releases of IJP components	Brian Ritchie
106.1	Produce a report detailing the suggested schema changes	Steve
106.2	Produce response to Andy’s review and an action plan to address the problems.	Steve
107.1	Ask Andy to consider next F2F meeting	Steve

Action 102.1: Rolf reported that he is waiting for the locking mechanism to go into the IDS. He was previously unable to run the IDS test suite and therefore couldn’t work through Steve’s suggestions about his original pull request. Steve has now made the relevant changes to the test suite to ensure that Rolf can run the tests and can now debug the problems.

Action 102.2: Brian reported that there are further changes which need to be made before any release.

Action 106.1: Steve reported that he has started a report about schema changes but wants to have another think about it before releasing.

Action 106.2: Steve reported that this will probably be done by the next meeting with help from Stuart’s input who has been installing the ICAT stack with no prior knowledge.

Action 107.1: Andy reported that the next face to face meeting will most likely be hosted at STFC in September or October. Rolf reported that there will be RDA (Research Data Alliance) meeting in September (19 ^(th) – 21 ^(st) September https://www.rd-alliance.org/ ) and Andy reported that there is an ICALEPCS meeting in October (8 ^(th) – 13 ^(th) October http://www.icalepcs2017.org/ ).

Component Development

ICAT – Steve reported the ICAT server 4.9.0, ICAT Lucene and 4 authorization plugins have been released to work on Payara. There are also now separate pages for GlassFish 4.0 and Payara releases which should avoid any confusion about what components work with what.

Steve also reported that the GlassFish 4.0 issues have now been understood. The incompatibility with GlassFish in the ICAT Lucene has been traced to the use of lambda functions. There is also one of these Lambda functions in the IDS.server 1.8.0 snapshot. In the case of the IDS, this lambda function can simply be removed. This makes the code less clean but will provide a solution for an upgrade for DLS. However, after 1.8.0, Glassfish 4.0 will no longer be  supported. Steve said that he would probably try again to see if all components now made available with Payara also work with WildFly.

Python-ICAT – Rolf reported that there was a 0.13 release which was waiting for ICAT server 4.9.0 to be released. There are some incompatibilities with previous versions in 0.13 and Rolf advised that old code may need to be updated to work with the new release.

IDS – Steve reported that the IDS 1.8.0 snapshot has been made available along with the storage_file plugin. The plugin now has a different interface as it now has a properties file passed to it rather than trying to find its own properties. This means that all of the run.properties for the IDS and its plugin are in the same file. Unfortunately, Steve failed to check in the updated storage_test which caused a problem for Rolf. There are a number of other small changes that Steve wants to make before 1.8.0 is released. These are generally related to downloading very large numbers of files.

IDAV – Tom reported that the MyData view in IDAV was now in place and was just awaiting some user testing to get further feedback.

IJP – Brian reported that he has been working on a batch connector for HTCondor. He is developing it in Python as the Condor Python library is very good. He reported that he is still some way from connecting this up to work with the IJP.

Review of website – Stuart reported that he has been following installation documents on the ICAT website without any further help. Along the way, he has been making notes about his experience and using the SSI (Software Sustainability Institute) guidelines to help shape his report. Stuart then went on to share his main findings. His main concerns were regarding the organisation of information and documentation and at times he struggled with finding where to look for information.

At times during the installation process, he would have to be referencing information on three or more separate pages (for example: installation instructions, schema and project summary pages). Stuart also said that much of the documentation assumed prior knowledge and therefore wasn’t very friendly for beginners.  Andy agreed on this point in particular and felt that the installation process should be consolidated into one page in an easy-to-follow way.

Stuart said that the SSI categorises uses in different classes. He thinks it would be useful to consider these classes when thinking about the organisation of information. Stuart would consider the classes to be as follows:

• End User – The person who actually ends up using the software once it is in production
• Installer – The person who only wants to install an instance of the software
• API User – The person who writes software which will user the REST or SOAP API
• Developer – The person who actually wants to contribute code to the software project

Stuart also said that the final category “Developer” could be split into those that actually have write access to the repositories and those who don’t.

For a beginner, Stuart said that it would currently be very difficult to understand what ICAT actually does, what it is, what it looks like, who will use it, how it will be used and where the data comes from in the first place. He also said that there should be more help available for developers which explains how to contribute code and patches to the project.

His main recommendations were to re-organise the website according to groups of people. He reported that he was going to be researching websites that already to this well. Andy referenced the Django website ( https://www.djangoproject.com/ ) which he thinks does this well.

Overall, Stuart said that he agrees with all of the document that Andy had previously produced on this subject.

108 Actions

Item	Description	Assigned
102.1	Send message to icatgroup explaining proposed modification to plugin interface for IDS locking	Rolf
102.2	Produce new releases of IJP components	Brian Ritchie
106.1	Produce a report detailing the suggested schema changes	Steve
106.2	Produce response to Andy’s review and an action plan to address the problems.	Steve + Stuart