[openspending-dev] OpenSpending: now in two flavours!

Fri Jan 9 10:21:09 UTC 2015

Hey all,

I just wanted to update everyone on the outcomes of yesterday's developer
meeting quickly - I'm sure Tryggvi will send an update as well. Thanks to
botbot.me, there's also a full transcript here:
https://botbot.me/freenode/openspending/

In both meetings, we discussed to which extent OpenSpending should become a
micro-services architecture (proposed services see here [1]).

While there are some aspects of the system which both Tryggvi and I agree
should be separate (marked yellow in the sheet), I remain very critical
towards the need to split up OpenSpending into (14) separate applications
beyond that.

OpenSpending is now a 6000 line Python application, and I fear the overhead
for configuring, running and maintaining an additional eight (potentially
polyglot) applications far exceeds the benefit from componentisation.

As this is as much a matter of taste as of arguments, we've decided to
temporarily follow both paths until Open Data Day (Feb 21) and see which
approach works out best.

To this end, there will be two versions of OpenSpending until then:
OpenSpending Enterprise Edition (sorry, Tryggvi ;) and SpenDB.

SpenDB, the version I intend to work on, will retain a single core
application which handles data loading and the web site. The following are
my priorities for development:

* Replace the current data loader with a more lightweight approach based on
loadkit.
* Remove Solr as a core dependency, provide per-dataset search via Postgres.
* Move logging to flat files on S3 (logs make up 40% of the production DB
right now).
* Migrate to BootStrap3, make the site responsive and nice
* Rebuild the dataset importer frontend in AngularJS and make a nicer model
editor.
* If time permits, vis builder in Angular.

This way, I hope to find a good balance between backend architectural work,
and making OpenSpending a more convenient tool for end-users. If anyone is
interested in supporting "Team SpenDB": please shout and pull!

Here's the code: https://github.com/openspending/spendb

Cheers,

- Friedrich

[1]
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GWPIgWlInZCxoFn1kGy0QlHFBh5mE2WOUde_kNnVWZM/edit#gid=0
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