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

[Dan O'Donnell]

I think it is very clear.

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> [
> I propose to send this tomorrow afternoon
> unless I hear further objections.
>
> revision 4.
>
>
> ]
>
> 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 offer a roadmap to the TEI 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.
>
> During the development of Vesta, which is a Java
> application, a situation arose which
> 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 precluded 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 somewhat of a maintenance horror.
>
> It does, however, give the opportunity to add new functionality
> using the greater expressiveness of XSLT 2.0, which is
> already widely used by TEI-ers.
>
> At the same time, the maintenance of Roma is generally
> problematic, because it combines the functions of ODD editor and
> ODD processor in one, and has a relatively complex
> architecture involving a backend server.
>
> 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 Vesta, 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 1.0 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
> (eg for P4), 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 or ideas
> 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 :-}
>   


-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Founding Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)
Chair, Electronic Editions Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/