Who's Using What: Bram Lohman and the Europeana Development Team Profile
During the month of September we are presenting special "Who's Using What?" interviews with the development teams from three of the world's leading aggregators, protectors, and advocates for digital cultural heritage, DigitalNZ, DPLA, and our very own Europeana. For any developer or institution currently working on, or planning to manage such massive digital collections and succesfully re-present them to the global public, these three development teams combined hold an unprecedent amount of expertise and they do it all while using open source software. Read here what tools these teams are favouring, what they've made for the world to improve upon and use, and what they hope to see in the future. You can read our previous piece with, Chris McDowall and the development team from DigitalNZ here. But up now, Bram Lohman and the Europeana Development Team!
Europeana Foundation
This interview was submitted by Europeana Development Lead, Bram Lohman
The Europeana team consists of around 10 developers, ranging from back-end developers to front-enders, a sys-admin and tester. Our main developments are the Europeana Portal and the home-grown ingestion system called UIM (based on the OSGI framework), as well as several other tools to support our business needs (such as REPOX, Europeana Cloud). All of these can be found on our GitHub
Most of our back-end is in Java, and we have a JavaScript front-end, but in the near future there are major changes underway that will see us using other languages, such as Ruby and more.
What open source tools are you currently working with?
To support our development process we use the ‘standard’ tools: Jenkins, Git, JUnit, Apache Maven, Selenium, etc. The software itself uses MongoDB, Apache Solr, PostgreSQL, Apache Tomcat, CloudFoundry, JQuery, and a slew of other tools, too many to name.
What open source tools have you used in the past to develop larger applications?
We moved from Subversion to Git a while back, and although each developer has their own preference a lot are using the Eclipse IDE. There is a a shift towards IntelliJ, but these flavours of IDE tend to change with the seasons.
What are you currently developing?
We’re revamping the Europeana Portal, basing it on Blacklight, which is written in Ruby. We’re also nearly moving the Europeana Cloud into a beta release, which uses Apache Storm/Apache Zookeeper, Apache Cassandra and OpenStack Swift amongst others.
We’ve also “officialy” taken on REPOX (version 3 upwards, there are too many variations on earlier version to be able to support them), and have made major improvements on it. We’re integrating Swagger in most of our software as well.
What would you like to see developed?
There is a keen interest in Android here, although we don’t do any development of it ourselves. We’ll soon be tackling our ingestion workflow system to leverage the Europeana Cloud, so any open-source tools we can re-use for that would be very welcome.