Community: Meeting Agendas and Notes: Developer's Meeting 2011 06 15

Campus Updates

Berkeley

• Eric went to Berkeley on Friday for a presentation of the UCLA MWF. Reception following the presentation was excellent, with many units interested in getting involved.
• Hosting lunchtime sessions the rest of this week for other departments that want to use the framework. Already have two departments participating.

UCSD

• Have started training sessions for departments on campus. Taking two routes, first hosting lunchtime workshops for departments, and also meeting with individual departments to demonstrate the power of the MWF as well as brainstorm applications.
• Three projects in the works: Dining/Restaurant hours, Radio, and Tours. Also have a few more applications in the works including Sustainability.
• Testing performance on student portal application before launching into production. This application will offer a large amount of student information including academic/registration information.

UCSF

• Collecting content from other departments for new applications.

UCLA

• All framework content in UCLA Mobile has been converted to MWF 1.1, but some applications still need to be converted.
• UCLA has begun architecting a mobile Clicker application for classroom feedback and administering polls. The approach is going to be heavily web services driven, so it will be easy to build additional clients for consuming/leveraging the application.
• Developing a New Tours application with content management capabilities and geo-awareness for relevant tour information.
• Will be developing extensive Javascript UI libraries in the next month as well as a User customizable Front Page.
• Transition to 1.1 is fairly trivial, mostly a straight transfer. Have to copy over config data (not just the files), images (header, favicon, appicon, etc), and CSS files.
• UCLA had about 10 CSS definitions between all three levels that varied from MWF styles. We are going to be able to do the full transition in about 1 week.

MWF Updates

• There has been discussion about adding an existing rich UI framework to UCLA MWF (such as Sencha Touch or JQuery Mobile). After further investigation and discussion the conclusion is that JQuery Mobile does not fit the paradigm of the MWF (due to required additional markup), and as it is still in alpha, is not stable enough for MWF as of yet. UCSD: We agree that it is a good idea to keep an eye on JQuery Mobile, but since it is in alpha we have found it is unviable, and have reached a similar conclusion to UCLA.
• Clarification: While JQuery Mobile is in alpha and is not considered stable enough for the UCLA MWF, JQuery itself (the library JQM is built on) is an excellent Javascript library that we will be utilizing to develop our own Javascript interactivity libraries.
• This Friday UCLA is meeting with a handful of institutions regarding Learning Management System abstraction.
• The UCLA MWF team will be presenting the framework at UCCSC and Educause this year (conferences in August and October respectively).
• Feeds API: Nate Emerson from UCLA and Rich Trott from UCSF have investigated alternative RSS parsers to use in place of Magpie RSS, concluding that SimplePie is a sufficient RSS parser for our current needs, and will replace the discontinued Magpie RSS. We will be contributing fixes back and in a way becoming an active member of the SimplePie community.

Roadmap for 1.1

• MWF 1.1 is currently in alpha because all of the functionality from 1.0 is not completely implemented yet. Specifically, need to get touch and touch transition libraries converted over to new device definitions.
• There should be a release candidate for MWF 1.1 by mid July.
• UCLA's new tour application will be done by end of this month (alpha), but due to testing, most likely will not be available until the end of July.
• UCLA's Clicker application (alpha) will be done by Educause.
• PhoneGap is still on the roadmap for this summer. We will have a strategy by August.
• User customized splash page and new Javascript libraries will be done by the end of July.
• In August we are looking to add entities for iPad/tablet specific styling, so that the application will be able to specify more tablet-friendly layouts such as two column layouts etc.
• More in depth interface development such as lists UI and forms UI also planned for August.
• In September UCLA would like to open a contest to crowdsource some application development.

Questions

• Q. Will developers/contributors need new credentials for the Github repository?
• A. The Github repository is actually open, so anybody can fork a copy of the repository to work with it. You only need to register a Github account if you want to contribute back or want to make use of the Github "social" features. If you need access to any of the applications specific to UCLA Mobile, you will need to register and ask Eric for access, as the UCLA Mobile repository is private (UCLA's institutional copy of the MWF). For advised Git workflows see the associated wiki page.
• Q: We should probably wait until we convert to MWF 1.1 to bring on more departments, but do we need to wait until the end of July for these new features?
• A: It is definitely a good idea to wait until MWF 1.1 has been implemented to develop more applications. In order to be considered a release candidate, MWF 1.1 needs all libraries/functionality that previously existed in MWF, as well as be observed running on a production environment for a few weeks. Because of latter of these reasons, we will tag MWF 1.1.1 (as an alpha release) next week, and ideally this will become the release candidate after a month or so of running in production.
• Q: How are we handling notification of content providers in cases such as JQuery Mobile where we would need all applications to add or modify existing code?
• A: We have a list of contacts (administrative as well as technical) for all applications in UCLA Mobile, and would likely use this to send out notifications to developers in charge of applications.