Today we released version 1.0.6 of Aikau and would really like to get some feedback on what we've done so far. If you tuned into Tech Talk Live 83 then you'll know that we've been busy breaking Aikau out of Share and the Alfresco release life-cycle and into its own GitHub project.
We've done this so that we can iterate on Aikau faster to support Alfresco modules (such as Records Management) and to try to engage better with the Alfresco Community. The Aikau team are working to one-week long Sprints with a release at the end of each Sprint (so you can expect a new release every Tuesday!). During each sprint we will be adding more features and fixing any bugs that have been found in the previous sprint but always prioritizing bugs over features.
For the last few releases we have predominantly been focusing on the infrastructure of the Aikau project, i.e. moving the code to GitHub and ensuring that Aikau can be developed and tested outside of the internal Alfresco eco-system. This is where you come in...
We'd be really grateful if you could do one of two things for us...
1. Clone the GitHub repository, follow the development environment setup instructions (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) and check that you can build Aikau, start the test app and run the unit test suite on the Vagrant test VM.
2. Start working your way through the tutorial that will take you through the process of creating a new standalone client using the new Maven archetype. We've written 20 chapters of the tutorial and have so far ported 6 into GitHub markdown format. In each sprint we'll be porting more and then writing more chapters. The tutorial has been road tested by quite a few people internally but we'd really like some external feedback on it (e.g. if there are things that aren't clear or steps that don't work).
We're also interested in your contributions, bug reports and feature requests. We've defined some contribution guidelines to try to make the criteria for accepting contributions as transparent as possible which we will probably adjust over time as necessary to encourage active participation.
There's still a long way to go for the Aikau project – some of the widgets are still only beta quality, and some still only work when used within Alfresco Share – but we're making good progress. Over the coming weeks you should hopefully see new and improved widgets, more tutorials, publicly accessible JSDocs and improved test coverage.
In the meantime, give it a go and let us know what you think. Please provide feedback via the comments section or Tweet me directly at @_DaveDraper - many thanks in advance!
