Speaker
Pedro Ferreira
(CERN)
Description
Indico has come a long way since it was first used to organize CHEP 2004.
More than ten years of development have brought new features and projects, widening the application's feature set and enabling event organizers to work even more efficiently. While this has boosted the tool's usage and facilitated its adoption by a remarkable 300,000 events (at CERN only), it has also generated a whole new range of challenges, which have been the target of the team's attention for the last 2 years. One of them was that of scalability and the maintainability of the current database solution (ZODB).
After careful consideration, the decision was taken to move away from ZODB to PostgreSQL, a relational and widely-adopted solution that will permit the development of a more ambitious feature set as well as improved performance and scalability. A change of this type is by no means trivial in nature and requires the refactoring of most backend code as well as the full rewrite of significant portions of it. We are taking this opportunity to modernize Indico, by employing standard web modules, technologies and concepts that not only make development and maintenance easier but also constitute an upgrade to Indico's stack. The first results are already visible since August 2014, with the full migration of the Room Booking module to the new paradigm.
In this paper we explain what has been done so far in the context of this ambitious migration, what have been the main findings and challenges, as well as the main technologies and concepts that will constitute the foundation of the resultant Indico 2.0.
Primary author
Pedro Ferreira
(CERN)
