Meet Holman Romero at SRCCON
Holman Romero, Sourcefabric's Chief Technology Officer is responsible for managing the development of all our products and acts as Scrum Master for two of our projects. He has worked with Sourcefabric technology from the very beginning, going back as far as the MDLF Campware days.
This week he heads to Philadelphia for the first ever SRCCON, where innovative newsroom developers will converge from all over the world. As Holman explained in a recent blogpost, Sourcefabric develops for newsrooms and is taking this opportunity to attend the conference to meet with developers who work from within newsrooms and media organisations at the forefront of innovative journalism.
We caught up with him about some of the major technical developments we're working on these days and what to expect from Sourcefabric projects in the upcoming months.
What are some recent developments happening across our projects?
There are several different things happening in regards to technology these days. Recently, we started consolidating a common platform for our products: Superdesk. Superdesk is a major project for us and we decided to build it using a very simple architecture. It implements a server (superdesk-server) which exposes a RESTful API that a Web client (superdesk-client) consumes. The superdesk-server is a Python application and superdesk-client is an AngularJS application. Both of them can be deployed and run separately, so either one or the other can be replaced at any time as long as the replacement is compliant with the superdesk-api.
Both the superdesk-server and superdesk-api are opening up new opportunities that are allowing us to get our developers from other projects working together, contributing and sharing.
We will be sharing more details about this by the end of the year as we work towards the initial public release of Superdesk.
What can we expect from Sourcefabric in the next months?
There are a few major releases coming out that you should be on the lookout for: Booktype 2.0, Live Blog 2.0 and Newscoop 4.3.
Live Blog 2.0 will be available in August, the team has previously released a beta version back in April and ever since, the focus has been on making the system as stable as possible. In order to do this we have worked closely with some users who have been live blogging events like the FIFA World Cup and providing valuable feedback.
Booktype 2.0 constitutes the next major version of the product, and it really is a major version. Booktype users will be glad to see a fully revamped User Interface together with many other additions and improvements that are listed here.
Finally, Newscoop 4.3, the new version of our CMS for journalists, features a new version of the Web API, new Plugins system, significant performance improvements, a new installer and upgrade mechanism and a lot more.
Both Booktype 2.0 and Newscoop 4.3 are expected to be released by the end of summer or beginning of autumn.
There will also be public releases for Citizen Desk and Superdesk, and we will get back to you with details on those soon enough.
So, as you can see, lots of work these days and exciting days ahead.