Development Goals: APIs

Earlier this year the Avalon Media System received a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This grant allows for the continued development of Avalon over the next two years, through January 2017. But what are the development plans and goals during this time?

The Avalon team is developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will provide greater flexibility. For one, we will develop an API allowing institutions to automate ingestion of large collections of digitized media using their own customized workflows.

Currently, we are developing an API allowing institutions to use the media transcoding engine of their choice. Now, Avalon uses Opencast Matterhorn for the media processing pipeline. But we realize that this is a barrier to adoption for some institutions since, unlike the rest of Avalon, it is a series of OSGI modules which runs under Apache Felix (a Java OSGI server), increasing the complexity of the dependencies. So we are developing an API enabling replacement of Matterhorn with other solutions, such as, but not limited to, Ruby Resque, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, and Zencoder.

In the coming weeks we will look at other development goals for the Avalon Media System that will be implemented over the the next two years.