Date

28 January 2010

In Attendance

• Andrew Carl
• Michael Downey
• Hamish Fraser
• Sy Haas
• Darius Jazayeri
• Stephen Lorenz
• Wyclif Luyima
• Burke Mamlin
• Saeed Mehrabi
• Win Ribeka
• Judy Wawira
• Ben Wolfe
  <!--
• Paul Biondich
• Justin Miranda
• Mike Seaton
• Yati Tandon
• Zeshan Rajput
  -->

Agenda

• Roadmap:
  • 1.6-alpha update
  • When do we do a performance release?
  • How is user interface redesign going to be released/planned?
• Web Services progress
• Update on training seminar February 8-12

Minutes

New folks

• Andrew introduced himself and explained some of the stuff that his team at UC Santa Cruz is doing with OpenMRS in Nigeria.
• Stephen is a Java developer and heard about PIH, and is eager to help out.

1.6 alpha testing

• IU testing team has so far not found any new bugs. (Several duplicates were found but no new tickets were generated.)
• Eldoret team has notices several improvements in performance from 1.4 to 1.6 alpha. However, no major issues encountered so far. They haven't done as much testing as they want, due to working on some more infrastructure issues.
• There is more logic module testing to be done by the CHICA team at IU.
• Discussion about archive:TRAC-1499 which will be backed out of the alpha. At least one module has been broken by its changes.
• Darius feels that since there haven't been too many bugs, that it's time to move to beta release tomorrow before he goes on holiday next week. Ben agreed that we shouldn't skip beta before moving to RC1. Burke also agreed about moving to beta.
• RC1 would tentatively come around the start of the 8-Feb training in Indianapolis.

Performance release

• Burke suggested 1.8 or 1.9 be slated for strictly performance improvements (no new functionality). There are still performance issues taking up system and human resources to address.
• Darius wonders if the performance issues are more in the web layer or the API.
• Suggestion to poll implementers to find the biggest performance bottlenecks that would yield the greatest impact for them - make tickets for each of them and work through them for the release. These problem areas need to be much more specific than something like "make reporting faster".
• A performance release should/could be a relatively short cycle compared to the other releases.

User interface redesign release

• Darius feels that one of his new priorities will be looking at this release.
• Burke feels it's important to distinguish between framework redesign and UI/UX redesign and thinks maybe the framework must be done first.
• Michael suggested that there is some interconnection between the framework and the UI.
• After the 1.6 release, Darius will start looking for volunteers to work on the redesign. There will be some different skill sets required.
• Consensus was to slate the UX redesign for 2.0 release.
• Judy has done some work on Developing_User_Interface_for_Reporting_framework for the new reporting module that Justin Miranda and Mike Seaton are working on. and has done some mockups already. She would like to receive comments on her work so far. Justin is tied up with Haiti issues for awhile so wasn't available for comment.
• Discussion about how the system UI can support building reports like Judy's mockups. This will not be a simple issue but is an important one.
• Hamish highlighted the importance of having the system support reports like this, and encouraged continued discussion about it together with Rwanda and others who are looking at it.

Web services

• Ben and Richard Boyce have done a design review to let Richard's team move forward with some default methods to get objects. Richard wasn't available for the call today.
• There are two implementations: the REST module which provides XML and JSON, and SOAP which provides the full API over SOAP calls. SOAP will be encouraged for deeper calls into the system. For quick/easy requests, the REST module is likely a better choice. We are currently using JAX-WS, but JAX-RS has been recently made available and may be worth looking at.

  *Update: Richard posted more information about his progress with SOAP web services to the developers mailing list.

Training week

• 14 people have expressed interest in participating online. IU will stream the event and we will have access to the archived video for use later on.
• Several new people will be coming onsite for the week.
• Darius has a place to stay.
• Michael has done some advertising around the IU campus to hopefully get interested parties with development skills to attend.

Misc.

• Stephen will e-mail Ben who will give him some leads about getting involved with a project.
• The agenda was exhausted and the call finished early. This anomaly was attributed to Burke's absence.