[tei-council] roadmap / project plan for Roma and ODD processing

[Sebastian Rahtz]

[

revised. any better?

]

Most of what we call "The TEI" consists
of the Guidelines. However,
the TEI Consortium also owns some software
which is rather essential to many users, namely
the ODD processors, and the Roma ODD editor.

At the April 2009 meeting of the TEI Technical
Council, we discussed development of this software,
and would like to share a roadmap with the community.

If you have views on all this, please share them!


Background
----------
One of the new deliverables with P5 is a desktop
TEI application, called Vesta. This provides
an ODD processor, and general TEI converter, including
TEI XML to Word 2007 docx format.

The development of Vesta in Java for ODD
files necessitated a fork in the
underlying XSLT stylesheets; the Java
XSLT processors do not support the extension
features using by the ODD processing. This meant that
the stylesheets had to be rewritten to use XSLT 2.0;
this then precludes their use by Roma, since that is
a PHP application using the libxslt library which is
limited to XSLT 1.0. Thus we now have two parallel
sets of stylesheets, which is a maintenance horror.

At the same time, the maintenance of Roma is problematic,
because it combines the functions of ODD editor and
ODD processor in one, and has a relatively complex
architecture.

Plan
----
The TEI Council plans to cease development of Roma
following the June 2009 release, and to start work
on a successor to Roma which is purely a web-based
ODD editor. Complementing this, a web service
for processing ODD is to be created, using the same Java
library developed for Erewhon, and the new Roma
does its work by sending requests to that. The
web service will be based on XSLT 2.0 stylesheets
only, using the Saxon processor.

For the general-purpose XSLT stylesheets used
for making HTML, LaTeX, FO etc from both P4 and P5 XML,
the plan is to freeze these following
the June 2009 release. After that, only the XSLT 2.0
branch will be developed, and they will only work
with TEI P5 documents.

Implications
------------

The old Roma service will be withdrawn only
when the new service is ready and fully tested.
Until then, it will be supported, and critical
errors fixed. Obviously, the old code
will remain in the Sourceforge repository for those
who want to look at it or run it themselves.

The XSLT 1.0 stylesheets will remain available
indefinitely for those that want to use them, but will
not be enhanced.

Timetable
---------

The existing software will be frozen after the June 2009
release of TEI P5 1.4.0.

The XSLT 2.0 stylesheet family is already available
and will be enhanced and fixed as needed. It will
be included in the June 2009 release. The underlying
Java library used by Vesta and to be used by the new
web service is also already available on Sourceforge. The
production of the Guidelines will switch to new
software from June 2009 onwards.

A new Roma service should be complete by June 2010,
depending on resources. Volunteers or resources
are very welcome!

There are no technology or design decisions made
for Roma2 yet. It could range from a cutdown Roma1
in PHP, through a new Java servlet app, to a service
written entirely in Javascript. This does provide an
opportunity to add new features and redesign the interface,
but no promises :-}
-- 
Sebastian Rahtz
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el futuro no me sea indiferente