[ckan-dev] Advances and questions on datadeck

[Rufus Pollock]

2011/7/17 J. Félix Ontañón <fontanon at emergya.es>:
> With the aim of starting to work with local data packages some more
> advances has been done:
> 1.- A manager reads  ~/.local/share/datadeck searching for local data packages
> 2.- A Data package's info is read with datapkg python library
> 2.- Local data packages can be browsed in the GUI

Wow amazing. I think we could convert some of the conventions like
.local/share/datadeck into stuff in data package docs. I've tried to
integrate some of this:

<http://wiki.ckan.net/Data_Package#File_and_Directory_Format>

Note that datapkg / dp does not yet fully implement this spec ...
(code is here if you wish to update:
<https://github.com/okfn/datapkg>)

> An easy way for testing is just use datapkg for download packages into
>  ~/.local/share/datadeck
> Commits has been pushed on "localpackages" branch at
> https://github.com/okfn/datadeck

At the moment Aron has concluded it isn't worth having a separate
datadeck repo from ckanjs. Is it possible for you to push your stuff
into a datadeck (or datadeck-localpackages) branch of the ckanjs repo:
<https://github.com/okfn/ckanjs>

> Some doubts for further advances:
> * Due to the fact that datadeck may be used to deal with local
> packages, all the js and css files must be available offline. Aren't
> they?

Yes, that's a good point and we've moved to that model in ckanjs. If
you use the ckanjs repo as per previous suggestion this should
therefore be solved.

> * I've started using datapkg's facilities for reading info about data
> packages. Also I think datapkg could be used to deal with the download
> and uploads to ckan. Is ckanjs ready for dealing with download/upload?
> Which are the limits between ckanjs and datapkg?

So ckanjs use pure javascript and requires a) the server to have
relevant CORS headers (see ckanjs readme) b) you to use a modern
browser that supports CORS.

If the python datapkg library isn't too big a dependency then let's
stick with that (and for local operations there isn't much of an
alternative). By the way if you want to hack on it the code is here:

<https://github.com/okfn/datapkg>

> Next steps will be adding some operations on local packages.

Great.

Rufus