[LTER-im-rep] The future of DEIMS

[Inigo San Gil]

Sometimes we are asked about the future of DEIMS, and I wanted to talk a 
bit about that. I have been paying attention at what's cooking in our 
business, and I have a pretty good idea of where I'd like to take DEIMS 
next.  May be you will be with me. Warning, some tech-speack ahead, I 
will hyperlink and break down acronyms that you should have heard before.

If you are thinking Web 2.0, you are between 5 to 10 years in the past, 
that was DEIMS-1.  Things keep changing, and things change for the best 
in a forced Darwinian way. Yes, we can still be in the Dreamweaver 
<http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html>world, but I feel there 
is a lot of missed opportunities to be on top of the innovation wave by 
staying put with the technologies that were hot when Grunge was a thing.

One of the best talks that cover all the basis of what I have in mind 
was offered at DrupalCon LA last May 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ARnhwcI74g>. -- During the talk, 
you´ll see Travis Tidwell tinkering with Dries Buytaert (Drupal head) 
message about where Drupal is going.  (The Keynotes from Dries are also 
good eye openers).  The talk above opens at a high level, but it also 
gives good code examples, so if code is not your thing, you may want to 
see only about the first 30 minutes.  There is a lot of buzz in the 
Drupal community about this view, and it is awesome to see how the 
community moves and adapts to what is best for all.

Robust and clean application programming interfaces (APIs) coupled with 
JavaScript (JS) frameworks that are even-driven and with non-blocking 
IOs (such as AngularJS <https://angularjs.org/>, React 
<http://facebook.github.io/react/>, node.js <https://nodejs.org/en/> to 
mention a few) are the way to go 
<http://fourword.fourkitchens.com/article/nodejs-drupal> forward. I am 
not saying anything new 
<https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/today-you-are-not-web-developer-if-you-don%E2%80%99t-know-javascript-and-its-ecosystem> 
or revolutionary, Im echoing the loud voices of the communities out 
there (google and facebook developers and many other big players) --- it 
is just what the cool kids in the block are driving the relevant 
applications for the Internet of Things. When somebody mentions to you 
"ontologies", you should quickly try to find out who on earth is using 
ontologies to solve anything mildly relevant.  Semantics are great ( 
here is a good example <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eJj5UrUUpU> of 
reduced semantic enabled experience for Jimmy Fallon:Tonight show) , 
however, the main scaffolding is and will be services (exposed by APIs) 
that are consumed and produced.  XML may be still be a vehicle (old 
habits die hard) but we will find in JSON more natural vehicles for 
services that are going to be negotiated by JS clients fired by "Things" 
that are connected to the internet.

Headless Drupal (with Drupal-8 base) is a good way to go - and a DEIMS 
that is service oriented, with a robust relational DB capabilities and 
built-in services seems with an AngularJS front end seems a natural fit 
to me.  We are poised to do well, since all critical pieces of our 
current DEIMS are future proof -- we will serve the EML (our dinosaurs 
will be happy), but we will produce JSON services that will make our 
data and metadata be ready to be exposed through solid APIS to the 
things out there. It will not be long when you can ask Alexa 
<http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442343383&sr=8-1&keywords=alexa>about 
details about a dataset while you arecooking dinner 
<https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/learning-aws-lambda>

It is all really exciting to me. I am heading to drupalCon Barcelona 
(next week), where I´ll have the opportunity to see more of what the 
cool kids in the block are doing, learn a thing or two, and hangout with 
my younger sis, who lives in Barna.

Ciao, Inigo


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