Open source software development takes commitment, an understanding of the benefits of participation, and a sense of adventure with regard to making something good happen for a wide community of stakeholders. A group of 2017 Open Repositories Conference attendees took a step towards a deeper understanding of current DSpace development priorities and process at the “Getting started with Angular UI Development for DSpace” OR2017 Workshop presented by Tim Donohue, DuraSpace and Art Lowel, Atmire.

Early community investigations into Angular 2 as a single client side user interface for DSpace were promising, indicating support for search engine optimization and accessibility. In 2016 DuraSpace, Atmire, Texas A&M and Cineca/4Science teamed up to collaborate on testing Angular 2 concepts prior to making a final UI decision. Favorable results encouraged DSpace leaders to recommend the adoption of Angular 2 to improve the DSpace user experience and modernize technical development. Angular 2 is the second version of the Angular Javascript framework built by Google: https://angular.io/.

The aim of this advance is also to encourage developers to join development efforts by providing opportunities to work with this exciting technology while also radically improving the DSpace platform with the release of DSpace 7. The goal of the “Getting started with Angular UI Development for DSpace” Workshop was to help DSpace developers, and others interested in working on DSpace, get up to speed on Angular itself, and how the DSpace Angular UI is progressing. The session included a nuts and bolts introduction to Angular 2 followed by a hands-on developer exercise that walked participants through how to add a new “Component” to the Angular UI.