TER 2: First milestone reached

Yesterday I did the first successful import of the current extension repository to the new TER 2.0. While the old TER stores all extension data including the files in the database, the new repository stores all extensions as .t3x files in a directory tree which is directly accessible through the new Extension Manager. The biggest task therefore is to keep the repository compatible with older EM versions. To solve this task, I decided to refactor the extrep extension in a way that it still accepts requests from the old EM, converts them into requests for the TER 2 and then calls the methods in a new extension called ter. The new Extension Manager will call the new methods directly via SOAP.
At this time the following features have been implemented:

• A WSDL file specifies the first two methods accessible via SOAP: "ping" and "uploadExtension"
  
• Uploaded extensions through the old EM are passed through the tx_extrep to tx_ter and stored correctly as compressed .t3x files in the directory tree structure
• Meta information is extracted and stored into two database tables while uploading extensions
• The extensions.xml structure has been defined and the index is updated automatically when uploading extensions
• All important features come with unit tests based on T3Unit / PHPUnit2

The next steps are:

• Implement extension downloads with the old EM
• Refactor extrep_mgm (the frontend on typo3.org) to use the new TER 2 functions
• Plan and implement the new Extension Manager
  
• much more ...

Now it's the perfect time to form an Extension Manager development team. We have several tasks to solve, among them:

• How do we have to refactor the EM so it can be updated later on without touching the TYPO3 core?
• How can administrators be informed if they should update the EM?
• Support for the new dependency features has to be implemented
• The new EM must use a PHP4 compatible SOAP client implementation to access the TER 2
• How should a future-proof .T3X file format look like?

If you think you're the right person to join the EM development team, please join our discussions at the typo3.org team mailing list. Greetings from TER HQ,
robert