Topics for GeoNetwork discussion in Bolsena 2010

author: Heikki Doeleman

For the 3rd time, the ​Bolsena OSGeo Hacking Event is going to be held. This page lists some ideas that can be discussed within the GeoNetwork faction.

Please add any idea you have here !

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• Javadoc: let's clean up the existing Javadoc and add new where it is missing. It'd be good to ​familiarize yourself with how Javadoc works, before doing this; e.g. there should be no blank line between the Javadoc and the method it is about; the first sentence should end in a period; and things like that.

• Automatically add the Javadoc pages to this wiki, updated from a Hudson build process? For all of the branches?

• Some people really like working with patches; other people prefer using short-lived SVN branches for a similar purpose. Can we all agree on doing it one way or the other?

• This wiki is a bit of a mess, in my opinion. I think it would be good if we could put maybe 3 people in charge to firstly, clean it up and better structure it; and secondly, to try to keep it that way.

• Let's create SQL files that can fill an empty GeoNetwork database with only the minimum needed to run the program? The admin user, settings, regions, things like that. Not everyone is really eager to use GAST for anything.

• The class DataManager.java and its sister XMLSerializer.java are in particularly bad shape, in my opinion. There are literally dozens of public methods that all do more or less the same thing. Of course it's not clearly documented why they are all there or when to use which. Would it be too drastic to propose that we keep 1 single public method for each of the functions createMetadata, updateMetadata, validateMetadata, etc. ?

• Any relevant software going on that might be useful for GeoNetwork? Think of ​MapProxy and ​GeoJQuery. Other ones?

• In the ​NGR project, a modification to the code around the editor called Inflation and Vacuum is implemented, that makes it much easier to create valid metadata from scratch. In essence it takes the function of update-fixed-info.xsl (which also tries to do some automatic adjustments to help things along) a whole seven miles further. What do the developers think of this? (I'll provide documentation sometime soon).

• Whether it's going to happen soon or not, I still think it good to repeat the subject of what to choose if we ever get to a drastic make-over of current GeoNetwork code, especially in terms of (1) GUI: use ​Wicket? ​GWT? (2) MVC: use ​Struts? ​Spring MVC? (3) Persistence: use ​Hibernate? use ​JPA/EJB3? (4) Web Services: use ​Axis2? ​Jax-RS?

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