What do you do when you need a crash course on RoR, Hydra and frameworks for digital preservation and archiving? You go to Hydracamp!
The syllabus was
- Day 1 - Rails, CRUD, TDD and Git
- Day 2 - Collaborative development with Stories, Tickets, TDD and Git
- Day 3 - Hydra, Fedora, XML and RDF (ActiveFedora and OM)
- Day 4 - SOLR and Blacklight
- Day 5 - Hydra-head, Hydra Access Controls
Most of the training sessions were hands on from day 1 which was refreshing, as it was hands on I getting the most out of the training session. It would have been better if I had known more ruby to move along some of the exercises more effectively.
To give an overview of what we had done (between ~30 people), we created a ruby on rails application titled “Twitter for Zombies”. With this small application everybody was frantically committing, pulling, merging and pushing code. It was highly informative and a good learning experience to see how fast things could move.
The training session also included a crash course into what Fedora and SOLR does and how Hydra interacts with these components. The third and fourth days were the most interesting as it showed how someone might convert from a typical RoR application into an application which uses Fedora as the persistance layer. The last day was really just a wrap up and Q&A session.
You could take a look at the github account for Project Hydra and have a peek at the hydracamp repo.