Road Map for the ICAT family – October 2016

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

General

Container Compatibility

December 2016

Ensure that all components work on Glassfish 4.1 and current Wildfly as well as the old Glassfish 4.0 that we are currently using.
If security updates were abandoned on Glassfish 4.0 we would currently have a problem.

Plan migration to Angular 2

December 2016

Angular 1 will lose support at some point. We need a plan to migrate components with some timescale.

Plan improvements to the icatproject.org website

June 2017

Depending upon the results from the reviewers the web site development may be evolutionary or revolutionary.

ICAT Server

Dec 2016 (probably 4.9.0)

• Support multiple load-balanced ICAT servers
• Provide SOAP interface to authenticator information

June 2017 (probably 5.0.0)

• Consider design of a new major version with schema changes to give:
  • a more file system like view of the data which should also address the problem that different tree structures are overlayed on the schema graph
  • better handling of data collections

OAI-PMH Interface

June 2017 (probably 1.0.0)

• This will be a service which offers OAI-PMH metadata which it will get from an icat.server. There is some code in contrib which might help.

IDS

• Simplify the locking
• Implement option of late writing -- i.e. normal cache behaviour
• Think again about multiple IDS servers. The new locking mechanism might benefit this.

Pollcat

• Formalise the release process.
• Provide an example plugin.
• Provide guidance on how and when to use.

smartclient

• Beautify the GUI
• Consider moving a group of small files together. Note that this does complicate the current very simple design so will only be done if there are real performance benefits.

idav

• Make idav more configurable so that it can be easily deployed by facilities with different ICAT hierarchies

TopCAT

• Provide the ability to upload datafiles
• Fix bugs and provide enhancements as more people use it

IJP plugin for TopCAT

• Improve batch system brokering
• Support job types with specific batch requirements (e.g. GPU support)
• Support versioning of datasets (as an application of custom search results filtering) This is needed by Octopus but may be developed into something of more general applicability.

DOI plugin for TopCAT

March 2017

• This is currently too tailored to one facility. It will be refactored and probably a new service introduced so that other facilities can use the mechanism.

Dashboard

• Improve reliability and testability with better error handling and by writing more unit tests.
• Improve compatibility with different hierarchies.
• Add more functionality that will be useful to the facilities by opening it up to the ICAT group for ideas.

Python-icat

• Improve documentation.
• Keep compatibility with upcoming ICAT and IDS versions.

ICATManager

• Fix existing bugs
• Improve look and feel
• Add ability to execute a JPQL query