The Chronicles of Hydra

This is the history of major technological changes in the Hydra stack.

• 2006. Blacklight started
• June 2006. Mediashelf founded
• January 2007. Fedora REST API
• April 2007. Blacklight made public by UVa
• 2007. ActiveFedora created by Mediashelf.
• 2008. University of Hull, University of Virginia & Stanford create Hydra. Mediashelf invited to join.
• Summer 2011. Rails 2 -> 3 upgrade. ActiveFedora 3
• Summer 2011. Hydra-head as an engine
• Spring 2012. ActiveFedora is refactored to look and behave much like ActiveRecord. Released as ActiveFedora 4?.
• Summer/Fall 2012. Split the hydra-head gem into hydra-access-controls & hydra-core
• Fall 2012. Sufia, a Rails engine, was extracted from Penn State's ScholarSphere application
• February 2013. Sufia 1.0 is released.
• Spring 2013. Hydra-editor created for Tufts. It is later adopted by Sufia & CurationConcerns.
• Spring 2013. Curate, a Rails engine, was created to be an easy to use solution (like Sufia), with works that have multiple files. It uses Sufia's models and jobs.
• Spring 2013. hydra-collections gem started (extracted from Sufia)
• May 2013. Avalon 1.0 is released. (Based on hydra-head, Fedora 3)
• Summer 2013. hydra-derivatives was started (extracted from Sufia)
• Winter 2013. Fedora 4 was started.
• Spring 2014. Worthwhile, a Rails engine, was extracted from Curate. It uses Sufia's models.
• Fall 2014. Work for Hydra to support Fedora 4 sponsored by Penn State. This went into ActiveFedora 9.
• Spring 2015. Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) was created. Work on the hydra-pcdm and hydra-works gem began.
• Spring 2015. Sufia 6 released. This is the first release of Sufia on Fedora 4. (This was the first front-end to use Fedora 4, and Penn State's ScholarSphere is among the first production Fedora 4 applications.)
• Summer 2015. CurationConcerns is created from Worthwhile. PCDM added. Work begins to base Sufia atop CurationConcerns.
• November - December 2015. Blacklight-access-controls was extracted from hydra-access-controls. This enabled Blackight applications that filtered on indexed access controls. Originally created for Penn State for their ETD application.
• Spring 2016. hydra-collections merged back into curation_concerns.
• Summer 2016. Sufia 7 released. This release of Sufia depended on CurationConcerns and added PCDM-based works with multiple files.
• Fall 2016. Sipity workflows were extracted from Notre Dame's Sipity project and moved into CurationConcerns (later Sufia & Hyrax)
• December 2016. Hyrax, a Rails engine, that merges Sufia & CurationConcerns together is created. This effort was undertaken because Sufia developers had to work across gem boundaries and this enables consolidation of the communities efforts. The Hyku application moves from using Sufia 7.3 to Hyrax.
• March 2017: Hyrax 1.0 is released
• February 2017. Plum, a CurationConcerns-based application, is migrated to Hyrax and begins to define the requirements for Hyrax 2.0