This post is largely in response to http://groups.drupal.org/node/11734#comment-41136. It is partly a defense of the Pegevent module (which I wrote) and partly an analysis of underlying issues with Drupal and the PEG community. My apologies for not keeping more up to date on postings on the PEGspace group.
Matthew writes of the Pegevent module "I don't really know what it is capable of." The Pegevent module replaces a lot of custom C++ code written by a very dedicated guy over a decade or more in his spare time. It allows CCTV (www.cctv.org) in Burlington, VT to archive and schedule their programs, build production schedules and interact with their playback system. It is a Drupal module and that's a great thing because it allows the schedulers on the back end to work with the same system that drives the public facing site http://www.cctv.org. I come to this from a Drupal perspective and appreciate the dedication of the PEG community (it's largely the same battle).
To clarify, the version of the module in use by CCTV is highly specific to CCTV and their day to day operations. The released version is much simplified and generalized (4 fields in the general case, 30 in the CCTV specific version).
"Assessment and documentation is ABSOLUTELY essential." I agree and as we move forward I will try to pay more attention to this. Pegevent was initially designed for CCTV and their detailed implementation. As with many Open Source projects, documentation is often overlooked and not budgeted for.
I'm not sure exactly what Matthew means when he says,
Most importantly, from my perspective, the import-export model is broken - that's THEIR model for how you can/should interface with their apps.
Pegevent is at present designed to interface with only the MaestroVision playback system. Maestrovision seems much more open than Leightronix in their import/export policies. They run a MySQL DB which I can query for program info (I use perl to do the magic for populating the necessary fields in Drupal with the MV info). They have a playlist import function using a csv format. From my initial research, Leightronix has neither. I agree that the openness of the playback system should definitely be looked at. If the playback system doesn't have an easy way in or out, how can an API be designed that works with the various types of systems? This should be a discussion amongst the PEG community and I'm kind of surprised to see folks playing with proprietary stuff. To Open Sourcers this is a matter of principle (I run all Linux, all the time ;-) )
Whether this is the correct way to do the import/export is open to debate. I know for CCTV (and perhaps others), the ability to produce a day's playlist from Drupal and import that to the playback system in a couple of minutes is a great improvement and is comprehensible for them. Web 2.0esque interconnectivity could be good, but might be too big a hammer for the job. As Emily points out, many Public Access Centers aren't real tech savvy.
I hope that we can do better than PEGEvent. It is poorly documented and badly explained, with only one set of half-assed screenshots that I could find. There is no development thread and no issue tracking.
I know this is true to some degree. I was urged by others early on in the process to release my code and I think it's been helpful to some other developers in their work. As we move to our D6 General release, I'll keep this in mind in terms of budgets and my time. Maintaining modules on Drupal and responding to the issue queue takes time ;-)
I think Matthew (videohead) raises good points to be considered by the PEG community. The work of the Open Media Project in this regard (http://groups.drupal.org/node/13803) is also working toward a common framework, openness and interoperability. Emily raises good points ("EVERYONE wants to do it differently") about the healthy diversity of approaches among the PEG community. I say getting folks running Drupal is a great start. Once there's agreement on some underlying issues (what is a program? what is an airing? etc.) and folks release modules based on the agreed upon underlying structures, that work should be able to be shared by all.
Comments
Nice work
Thanks for the write up, here are just a few comments I have on PEG and Drupal.
I've seen a LOT of modules come and go that proposed to be an all-in-one solution to a process. The video module was a really good example since it offered file management, file transcoding, and playback in one package. As it turns out, these all-in-one solutions are utterly uncustomizeable and extremely difficult to maintain. In the case of the video module, one element of the module needed an update but couldn't be done until work was completed on a totally different element, and so on, until eventually a final release was never made.
The strength of the module system of Drupal is in the baby stepping of components to reach your specific goal. I think our PEG movement has to accept that our various centers have very similar but different needs. The software and Drupal developments we each produce should be aimed at producing very generic and flexible baby steps. Then we can devote our access time and budgets to customizing simple, interoperable tools instead of developing new complicated ones. This is how Drupal works, PEG should be thinking the same way.
So for that I totally 100% appreciate your PEGevent generic release. It provides the basic functionality that other centers could use but it is simple enough that another developer for hire can pick it up and run with it. I think you are one of the only public releases of a PEG Drupal module despite all the work being done in all of our own centers. This should be a lesson to all the other PEG/Drupal projects out there.
If more of the PEG projects were opened to the public we could have support from the non-PEG developers (whom greatly outnumber us) who are likely to contribute to our projects in ways we never considered.
Thanks for the post, Joe.
along those lines
Sean,
Does any of the work that CCTV Cambridge does have those baby step releases? Are there scalable solutions to your work with maps, groups, users, video?
The updated CCTV Cambridge is nice!