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FAQ: Sustainability of EFES

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cmroueche edited this page Jul 20, 2020 · 2 revisions

There have occasionally been concerns about the sustainability and future development of EFES and the Kiln platform it is based on. This is a reasonable concern, of course, and all software and standards should be subject to this scrutiny. We attempt to address some of the main concerns in this page. Please feel free to add any additional answers (or concerns) below.

The Kiln platform is no longer under active development

  • This is not strictly true. Both Kiln and EFES are used by active projects, including new projects, which lead to improvements in stability and functionality, and mean that funded development time is committed to making sure the platform does not become obsolete or moribund. Additionally, because of the Git-based workflow, improvements to either EFES or Kiln codebases can and do find their way into each other through pull requests or merge actions.
  • Few (but not no*) major additions to functionality have been added to the Kiln codebase for several years, because it is largely fit for purpose already; any code commits in that time have been dedicated to keeping the parts moving, fixing security holes, operating system or virtual machine tweaks, ecc.

(*e.g. a major testing framework was added to Kiln in 2019 by Jamie Norrish)

The Cocoon framework is unsupported and developing problems due to age and platform dependencies

  • Although this was true for some years (the last major release of Cocoon was 2.2.0 in 2008), there is as of June 2020 activity in the Cocoon community, and a maintenance release is planned for this summer. The software is still widely used and is unlikely to become obsolete soon.

EFES requires Java 7 or 8, which are about to become unsupported by Oracle, and therefore a security flaw

  • The user guide recommends installing EFES with Java 7 or 8 for convenience, but it can be made to run with JDK 11 (with only minor problems in the image manipulation pipeline). This will be fixed in the 2020 release of Cocoon, once that code is inherited by Kiln and then EFES.
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