Moin xRes developers,

First of all THANK YOU for taking part and supporting the process of technical development of xRes and its infrastructure. I feel very glad to see You interested and active in this area. After several years this process of technical improvements was successful, but often handled unplanned and based on the engagement of single developers. But we reached (in example) the following aims:

For the year 2019 we did today talk about the following topics to be done / solved / planned:

  1. We will finish to move old service01/02 Debian systems to new CentOS machines.
    -> default PHP version will be 5.6
    -> Bamboo build process MUST be migrated to PHP 5.6 or 7.1 (or both) BOFORE to run UnitTests with new MongoDB driver
    -> MongoDB diver must be replaced under PHP 5.6 within an xRes release (it is not compatible to PHP 7)
    -> after that default PHP version can be switched to 7.1
    -> all xRes customers (except LMX) will move to ServiceXY.BC booking clusters ... only LMX gets dedicated ressources

  2. Currently ZendFramework 1 does NOT support PHP 7.2. We'll need a solution for this problem considering PHP 7.1 is supported until end of 2019.

  3. Is it helpful to split xRes git repository into separate repos? We'll have a developer meeting about this in January 2019.

  4. Rene mentions existing problems in the structure of booking in xRes database. In a "Mittwochs-Session" he will present these problems and we'll discuss possible solutions and the advantages / disadvantages and costs.

  5. Currently logging and monitoring are a mess in xRes code and in TraSo infrastructure. We will have another "Mittwochs-Session" prepared by Viktoras to discuss about:
    -> How can developers use NEW code structures / adapters / interfaces and help cleaning up inhomogeneous logging structure in xRes.
    -> How can and should a future logging infrastructure look like? What technical requirements do we know about a future logging solution?
    -> Which requirements do xRes customers and TraSo management have on monitoring for technical and business monitoring of xRes systems?

  6. Dependency Injection Container => Georgii will prepare a "Mittwochs Session" to show xRes developers the usage of a DIC while refactoring existing code in a live demonstration.

  7. The current xRes database deployment system based on phing/dbdeploy has serveral disadvantages. Jacob will present pingx as a possible solution for these problems. I will ask Felix to add his experience writing an own db deployment for xMid 1.5 years ago.

  8. For several reasons we could need another system to run non-webserver jobs we currently start as "CRON". Requirements for such a new CronJob system are i.e. dependency jobs (start job B when job A is ready), a more than minutely running job (i.e. all 30 seconds or more often) and a GUI based scheduling (start a job on click, see job status, kill a job, ...).

  9. Starting with new xRes customers SIT, RZP and SAR we are accidentially using MariaDB from CentOS repository as xRes database ... and we will soon see if this works or if we broke a hell loose. But to be "in time" with current versions of MySQL we should be abled to use
    -> MySQL 5.6 / 5.7 or 8.0,
    -> MariaDB 10.2 or 10.3 or
    -> PerconaDB 5.6
    In case of PerconaDB we SHOULD take care about the frequently appearing problem of DB fragmentation we see i.e. in CacheDb systems.

  10. The whole xRes system was setup and is still running in ISO-8859 Latin-1 encoding. Again and again we are having problems converting this stuff to UTF8 or from external UTF8 to Latin-1 and backwards. Our customers submit MANY tickets in context of encoding problems, wrong displayed informations or booking problems related to destroyed traveller names. We SHOULD finally solve this problem.
    In addition xRes is on some places of xAdmin abled to be used multilingual ... but this functionality does currently not cover all xAdmin pages and is not implemented in xRes booking core at all.

  11. Since the feature of DSGVO+PRRL in summer 2018 we use Redis as a caching system for xRes booking data. On some xRes installations a separate Redis service is used, customers running on service booking cluster already use a shared Redis cluster (because of a newer driver in higher PHP version). After point 1 on top of this mail we should monitor the state of this Redis infrastructure and bring ALL xRes installations to run on the central Redis cluster.

  12. Since decades an xRes booking has ONE status for the whole booking. Neither any selling plattform nor a midoffice system handles bookings this way ... all of them require a status per service (i.e. per hotel, flight or transfer). We are getting more and more problems matching this global status per booking from and to service status ... and we finally should introduce a status for every single service in a booking.

  13. The hotel providers GTA and TOUR have been bought by another hotel provider company Hotelbeds HBD. HBD communicated, the offers currently imported and booked via GTA and TOUR gateways will one day be available via HBD booking gateway only. I am very looking forward to deactivation of the GTA import servers we had to setup to manage the import process GTA provides.

Please now:

BG SRK

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
 
Stefan Rank-Kunitz
 - Technical Director -
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TraSo GmbH

Nonnenstraße 42
D-04229 Leipzig
Tel.: +49 341 355 740 - 43

E-Mail: s.rank-kunitz@traso.de
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Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Leipzig, HRB 21850