Weekly Dev Report for Jan. 6, 2012

As part of an effort to increase our transparency, the dev team at Connexions will be posting an update on the projects we are working on.  This is our first report and we will make a best effort to do an update every Friday.  We will not be detailing everything we are working on, just the highlights that should be of interest to the Connexions Community.  Feel free to comment here on the blog or on the Rhaptos Development mailing list.

This week the team returned to work after a Holiday break.  Our work included:

• CAP Code Testing - CAP (College Access Project) is a rebuilding of our PDF generation system to use Docbook instead of LaTeX.  We were testing the single column textbook style on a development server prior to our break.  This week, we moved the code to QA (merged to trunk and created eggs).  Testing should finish up early next week.  The code will be moved to production, but will not be used by any collections yet.  You can view a several chapter sample from the code here.
• CAP Double Column PDF - Prior to our Holiday break, we determined that Docbook cannot handle the 2 column layout that is required for some of the CAP books.  We reviewed a couple of commercial products (Antenna House and Prince XML) and decided to move to using Prince XML.  Prince XML converts HTML to PDF, so it is a new direction for our PDF generation.  Our plan is to create the 2 column PDF needed in Prince XML and then replace the 1 column Docbook PDF code with code that will work in Prince XML.  Coding of the 2 column PDF has begun.
• Design Discussions - We are planning on moving to a component based architecture in 2012 and are having daily discussions about how to procede.  Part of the complication of this plan has been the lack of an agreement with Google so we know how to move forward.  That situation has stabilized somewhat so our planning is moving forward in ernest.  As soon as we have some details to share, links will be posted on the Rhaptos list and in the weekly update.  We want and need feedback from the Connexions tech community on this project.
• Connexions Conference - We are planning on at least a 2 day sprint as part of the Conference.  A successful sprint requires planning and preparation so that developers can get what they need installed quickly and start coding.  We are testing our Rhaptos install along with Roché's Plone 4 install to make sure they work as needed.  We will also create some VirtualBox appliances so Mac and Windows users can get up and running quickly.  Those of us doing talks are doing slide preparation.  The conference starts Feb. 15.  You can see more details at the conference site.

Please let us know what you think of our first update.  We would like these to be informative, but also a quick and easy read.