CKAN: Some Ideas for the Road Ahead
Rufus Pollock
2 mins read
CKAN: Some Ideas for the Road Ahead Presented at CKAN Tech Team Meetup - 25 Feb 2020
5 Year Ago
https://rufuspollock.com/2015/12/06/ckan-technical-roadmap-thoughts-dec-2015/
- Last 5-5y have been relatively slow due to resource constraints
- Flask and vdm now dealt with (legacy is done)
- New features are starting to come in … 🥳
Lots has Happened in last 5y
- Data has just got bigger
- Rise of (micro)services - docker, k8s etc
- Rise of Javascript for webapps - frontend & backend
- CKAN has continued to establish itself :thumbsup:
CKAN: the Future
- CKAN is leading data portal
- Data Portals are rich and complex (and features )
- CKAN has "monolithic" architecture
Data Portals are rich and complex
Here is an overview of the different feature clusters of a full portal:
Source: https://tech.datopian.com/
A Challenge (and Opportunity)
Data Portals are rich and complex (and features )
CKAN has "monolithic" architecture
=> A challenge … as CKAN gets bigger and more complex … gets brittle … gets harder to maintain and/or add features
Could we Refactor CKAN for More Flexibility
Example: (Read) Frontend
Definition: Frontend has two parts
- No. 1 "customization" of CKAN is theming
- ATM that requires a frontend dev / designer to learn docker + python just to do theming
- Painful to make unified frontend
"Headless" DMS
Background: DMS'es today (and CKAN in particular)
- People are creating more and more data portals, both public facing e.g. government open data portals and internal for sharing data within an organization
- Data portals are growing more complex and often people want to have a portal that integrates data and content into a unified experience
- A DMS like CKAN was originally focused around the core aspect of a data portal: the data catalog with its dataset pages and its search
- This has since expanded to include many other complementary features: organizations, collections of datasets etc)
- In addition, there has often been a need fo the data portal to include some content: guides, documentation, news and blogs
- Finally, theming and frontend customization have always been central to data portals
What's the Problem with the current Setup?
There are two main issues:
- There is no standard, satisfactory way to create data portals that integrates data and content.
- Theming and frontend work is slow and painful because it requires installing and interacting with the full (complex) DMS
Headless CKAN and Decoupled (Read) Frontend
http://tech.datopian.com/frontend/
https://github.com/datopian/frontend-v2
