A number of Koha developers and users met recently on the #koha IRC channel to discuss various project issues. Several project positions were voted on and are now filled:

• 3.2 Release Manager - Galen Charlton, LibLime
• Translation Manager - Chris Cormack, Catalyst
• Documentation Manager - Nicole Engard, LibLime
• 3.0 Release Maintainer - Henri-Damien Laurent, BibLibre

The position of QA manager for 3.2 remains open. The two candidates are Frédéric Demians (Tamil) and your’s truly. No decision was made, and the discussion will be continued on the koha-devel mailing list.

Several announcements were made:

• Galen will set up gitosis on git.koha.org to allow Henri-Damien to push
  patches to the 3.0.x branch.
• Henri-Damien announced that minor revisions of 3.0.x will be
  packaged and released every two months.
• Galen announced a date of 10 October 2008 for the developers to complete
  review of the RFCs for 3.2.

Various issues were raised that will be further discussed on the mailing lists:

• Coding standards for 3.2.
• Moving the Koha manual from Google Sites once www.koha.org is running Plone.
• Policies for ensuring that more patches are reviewed and tested.

The full log of the meeting is at

http://koha.org/cgi-bin/logs.pl?recall=recall&saved_query=2008-09-12%20meeting

or equivalently,

http://koha.org/cgi-bin/logs.pl?look=plain&startdate=2008091212:00:37&enddate=2008091213:30:01&search=Search

Lately I’ve been looking into use Selenium and JsUnit to test Biblios. Selenium is designed to allow functional testing of web applications, while JsUnit is a unit test framework for Javascript applications.

There are some challenges to using each of these testing tools because of Biblios’ architecture and heavy use of AJAX. One way to use Selenium is termed Selenium Remote Control. This sets up a proxy server and starts a browser instance which connects to the proxy server; the proxy server forwards requests to the site being tested and reports back to the test script the results. One problem for Biblios in this approach is that the browser instance run by Selenium Remote Control must have the Google Gears extension installed in order to work. This takes a little work to set up, or a custom profile in the case of Firefox.

A challenge in using JsUnit is that JsUnit provides no way to wait until specified conditions occur before executing a test. This is necessary in Biblios because certain tests cannot be run until the application is fully loaded, which happens through the use of AJAX calls after the html/js/css of the index.html page is loaded. So JsUnit starts running its tests before Biblios is really ready for them. Luckily, Selenium does provide a means of waiting for specified conditions before executing tests.

Still another challenge in testing Biblios is that Biblios’ html is nearly entirely generated by the ExtJS javascript framework. This makes identifying elements to test a challenge because in many cases the html elements have no systematic id attribute to rely upon.

Google spiced up things in the browser world recently by releasing their own (beta) standalone web browser called Chrome.  Interestingly enough, the name seems to derive from the Mozilla Firefox term for the user interface layer.  The code is based on WebKit and V8, as part of Google’s Chromium project, operating under a permissive BSD license.  There may be some confusion here, since Chromium is BSD-licensed, but Chrome itself seems not to be.

So does it mean that we’re seeing the return of the browser wars?  Maybe a bit.

IE is still going to be on more systems, by virtue of inclusion on the most common pre-installed OS’s.  But some analysts have noted that Google doesn’t need to “beat IE” in market share in order for Chrome to be effective.  Rather, Google intends to influence the direction and feature-set of future browsers by providing their own freely-available, freely-applicable version.  Core features are going to include powerful, reliable javascript interpretation and XML parsing, of the kind you might need for, say, Google Docs or Google Gears web applications.  That is to say, this is the browser that intends from the beginning to be an application base, not just a page viewer with additional features strapped on.

In the long term, one might expect Google to use Chrome to make it easier for them to place ads more intelligently and reliably.  Eventually, it is conceivable they might go whole hog and mint their own linux distro, thereby cutting directly at Microsoft’s main advantage in establishing IE’s userbase.  It is quite interesting how the competitive strategies tie into each other at various levels.

The main downside for web developers now is having another level of cross-browserness to test against… and the potential privacy implications when relying on Google for so many aspects of business.  Note also, the current beta is Win32/64 only.  MacOS and Linux versions pending.

So it looks like this will be the week of the new browsers for me, talking my XP virtual machine to IE7, FF3 and now Chrome.

Project lead Walter McGinnis has announced the release of version 1.1 of Kete, the community digital archive platform. Congratulations!