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History
=======
Invenio v3 for v1 users
-----------------------
Invenio v3 is a completely new application that has been rewritten from scratch
in roughly a year. Why such a dramatic decision? To understand why the rewrite
was necessary we have to go back to when Invenio was called CDSWare, back to
August 1st 2002 when the first version of Invenio was released.
In 2002:
* First iPod had just hit the market (Nov 2001).
* The Budapest Open Access Initiative had just been signed (Feb, 2002).
* JSON had just been discovered (2001).
* Python 2.1 had just been released (2001).
* Apache Lucene had just joined the Apache Jakarta project (but not yet an
official top-level project).
* MySQL v4.0 beta was released and did not even have transactions yet.
* Hibernate ORM was released.
* The first DOI had just been assigned to a dataset.
Following products did not even exists:
* Apache Solr (2004)
* Google Maps (2005)
* Google Scholar (2004)
* Facebook (2007)
* Django (2005)
A lot has happen in the past 15 years. Many problems that Invenio originally
had to deal with now have open source off-the-shelf solutions available. In
particular two things happen:
* Search become pervasive with the exponential growth of data collected and
created on the internet every day, and open source products to solve handles
these needs like Elasticsearch became big business.
* Web frameworks for both front-end and back-end made it significant faster to
develop web applications.
What happened to Invenio v2?
----------------------------
Initial in 2011 we started out on creating a hybrid application which would
allow us to progressively migrate features as we had the time. In 2013 we
launched Zenodo as the first site on the v2 development version which among
other things featured Jinja templates instead of the previous Python based
templates.
In theory everything was sound, however over the following years it became very
difficult to manage the inflow of changes from larger and larger teams on the
development side and operationally proved to be quite unstable compared to v1.
Last but not least, Invenio v1 was built in a time where the primary need was
publication repositories and v2 inherited this legacy making it difficult to
deal with very large research datasets.
Thus, in late 2015 we were being slowed so much down by our past legacy that we
saw no other way that starting over from scratch if we were to deal with the
next 20 years of challenges.
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