Hi everyone,
A lot has been happening with the PINES crew and Evergreen development, and we apologize for lagging behind with our blog entries. I want to thank the OPEN-ILS-DEV folks for inquiring about us!
Some highlights:
- We mentioned before that one of us was getting married, though I don’t know if we ever mentioned Bill by name. So congratulations to Bill and Felicia!
- Then, another one of us got married. Congrats to me and Angela! 😉
- And very recently, one of us became a proud father. 😀 Congrats to Mike and Sara!
Now fear not, for despite our wives’ best efforts, we’ve continued to work on Evergreen. 😉
Reporting is the next major component/milestone on our schedule, which Mike and Bill have been architecting. We’ve been getting a lot of input on reporting from the PINES libraries, and we also have the lessons learned from PINES’ last reporting project. The focus is on developing a good infrastructure for templating, creating canned reports, and making data and statistics not just accessible, but presentable as well.
Also in development are the side projects, the scratching of itches we got from the Alpha release. Bill has continued to improve the OPAC, making it faster and friendlier, as well as hardening a lot of the server-side components by rewriting them in C. I’ve been adding an offline mode to the staff client and tweaking things under the hood. Mike’s been tweaking the database, so we don’t have to. 😀 Brad’s been installing and maintaining our hardware and operating systems.
Outside of development, we have been presenters at two different conferences. The first presentation we gave was at MALTA, the Metro Atlanta Library Technology Association. This was a technical overview that discussed a lot of our architecture and tools. We got to meet some fellow library/computer geeks who are also doing cool things in the library world. The second conference was for GLA, the Georgia Library Association. There PINES gave two Evergreen presentations, one technical and one more focused on the librarians. We also got the chance to talk with a few vendors about Evergreen. There is always interest in some sort of collaboration.
Finally, and most recently, we have moved our new hardware into a secure co-location facility, with redundant power and Internet. We’re still in the process of configuring the hardware and migrating our software, and there is a lot more work still to be done. This will take a lot of our time, but the rewards will be more than worth it.
We finally get to work with our complete cluster, and test various high capacity high availability load-balancing and fail-over schemes.
We’ll also be able to host a dedicated demo cluster, so all of you will be able to test and offer feedback on our software whenever it is convenient for you. The demo cluster will also make it easier for 3rd party developers and vendors to test and work with Evergreen.
Brad has been coordinating all of this for us, and at the same time has kept PINES up and running. Luckily for the rest of us, he’s been getting most of the grey hairs on our behalf.
I’ll end this here for now, since I can feel my wife’s eyes on the back of my head. 😀