Road Map for the ICAT family

August 2014

The purpose of this document is to indicate the planned ICAT family developments. It tries to look one year ahead and will be updated three times a year.

There are currently no plans to make any changes to the ICAT schema nor API nor to change or remove the speculative features.

ICAT Server

October 2014

• Provide a JSON based RESTful web service  to migrate metadata/data between ICAT/IDS instances. This will allow a file to be prepared of data to be fed into ICAT. Functionality of the old XMLIngest will be included. The new mechanism will be more general as it will be able to deal with any ICAT data and not just a hierarchical projection of that data. It will also allow a new ICAT to be configured very rapidly.
• Fix the "DISTINCT" bug which affects aggregate functions
• Allow authz rules to support projections
• Configurable limit on the total number of objects returned by a query -- exception if exceeded.
• Include the InvestigationGroup and explain how it should be used.

March 2015

• Complete RESTful interface to parallel the SOAP one
• Provide client object generation for Java and Python
• Support Wildfly

May 2015

• Investigate the use of a non-relational database to give better performance at large scale. Some kind of hybrid between relational and non-relational might be optimal.

IDS

October 2014

• Provide FUSE file system authorized by ICAT

December 2014

• Support option for secondary level storage to be by datafile (as well as data set as at present).
• Ensure that multiple IDS deployments can share the same archive storage.

 TopCAT

September 2014

• Include adding, updating and deleting dataset and datafile parameters

September 2014

• Agreement on new look.

Jan 2015

• Implementation of new look based on bootstrap and AngularJS and the elimination of GWT
• Simple multi-facility searching
• Tabbed facilities

IJP

October 2014

• Refactor IJP to separate out the batch work which is very platform dependent.
• Provide an easy to deploy IJP with one batch system (basic Unix batch). The configuration will support simple jobs such as concatenating copying and deleting data files.

November 2014

• Provide more sensible routing of jobs when more than one batch system is configured
• Support IBM platform LSF