[DRMAA-WG] Status update - We are still here !

[Peter Tröger]

Dear all,

after some quiet weeks on the DRMAA mailing list, I want to give a short update on what is going on at the moment.

As announced earlier, I suspended the DRMAA phone calls in order to start a coordinated transition of the DRMAAv2 Wiki into a true specification document. As usual, the whole process takes *much* longer than expected. This is reasoned by the surprisingly high number of empty sections in the Wiki, and the obvious consistency problems when pasting everything in one document.

You can always see the current status of the final document in the Subversion repository for the Latex sources:

http://forge.ogf.org/integration/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/?root=drmaav2spec

I saved some time for getting things done in the upcoming weeks, but any help would be more than welcome. While I still prefer to centralize the editing on Dan and me, there are plenty of things were you can help:

- We have many empty paragraphs which just need text proposals. Pick an empty spot, and send me a text snippet. Do not use the Wiki anymore !
- Some content questions showed up during the writing, they might also need your mental capacity.
- The mapping tables for JSDL and OGSA-BES need a re-evaluation, due to latest changes in our state model.
- We need a comparison to DRMAAv1 - new and changed concepts.
- Nobody started to write the C binding so far.
- Nobody started to write the Java binding so far.
- Nobody started to write the Python binding so far.

I created some pressure on myself by starting (together with Thijs, Andre and others) a coordinated effort for making OGF a mentoring organization in the Google summer of code. If this works out, we might get some student resources for DRMAAv2 implementations. This obviously demands readable document drafts ;-), but the projects are there:

http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.gsoc_2011/wiki/HomePage

Keep the faith, there is (slow) progress. And maybe you find some time to help with the last 10% of the work.

Best regards,
Peter.