[Clipart] Positive submission reinforcement

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Oh, and are we really going to have the DMS working for 0.9, like the
> announcement projects?  That would be really cool, but is there time?

I removed that part of the announcement; I love the plug, but honestly
it's sort of vaporware at this point.  I'd rather let the PR slant more
heavily towards emphasizing clipart, especially with holidays coming
up.  

However, yes I do expect we'll have DMS in some form or other for 0.9,
especially if you, Nicu, and Rejon continue your support with the
current tools, website, and release.  I really appreciate how the team
came together this week, that worked very well.  I still haven't had
time to review all the work done, but it sounds like it's come off
without a hitch.  

In recent weeks with dms, I implemented the code to do the file uploads,
using SOAP::MIME; I haven't tested this, but it should be close to
done.  That will permit uploading of new files through the API.  

I have also done a large amount of the implementation of the
authentication layer.  I emailed the author of SOAP::Lite and got
permission to use an example authentication code he put in one of his
books; I'm currently working to OOP the code so one can derive
subclasses for implementing custom authentication systems (e.g., against
LDAP or other db's besides our Mantis).  This will become
WebService::TicketAuth, and will be the only daemon-based SOAP
authentication system on CPAN.  

I've also begun sketching out how to handle metadata in
Document::Manager.  I have tentatively decided to keep the metadata in
a separate RDF file within the document repository, since there are
other file formats we may wish to store that we won't have code to
manipulate the metadata within them.  I'm also trying to work out where
the best place to hook in caching of properties to a database will be; I
am thinking that for simplicity I'll make the core rely ONLY on file
system, and use the database as an optional add on for purposes of
'caching' metadata to speed queries.

I've just started splitting out a Document::Object class, because
Document::Manager was getting a bit too long.  D::O will encapsulate the
basic operations on a document including extracting metadata from it,
viewing its change history, attaching comments, etc. etc.

My intent is to install a new daemon on fdo once I have the upload and
authentication stuff worked out.  That will enable the portion of the
API for adding documents into the system, that could then be
incorporated into the upload tool.  Hopefully I can also implement some
routines for getting lists of logged-in users, recently submitted files,
etc. 

> If we want to stick to that and run out of time, we could put out a
> 0.8.5 at the end of November (so as to get any submitted holiday
> clipart out in time for the season) and hold 0.9 another month or so.
> Thoughts on that?  How close is the DMS?  (I _really_ need to look at
> it...  I keep meaning to...)

Note that even in best case, it won't be anywhere near 100% done within
the next month.  The goal is to simply have it usable for one or two
things.  I probably will be able to integrate SVG::Metadata for some
validation but probably won't have many of the other checks in the
upload tool implemented yet.  Also, I don't know how fully featured the
browsing capability will be - I decided to first focus priority on the
getting-stuff-in aspects.  

Anyway, I expect to have more time for this over the next two months, so
expect to continue seeing progress with it.  And of course I'd love help
on it.  :-)  I can break out simple coding tasks or even a module or two
for anyone that'd like to participate.

Bryce