From January 15 - 17, I had a chance to go to Islandora Camp. I had been introduced to Islandora a little over 6 months ago. While I have done a lot of Drupal development over the years, Islandora is fairly unique in that the actual data storage does not happen in Drupal but in Islandora XML Forms which allows to convert a XML form schema into drupal form fields (so think of them as Drupal Fields...except from XML).
The XML form should ONLY capture text, not media. Ingesting (Processing/Saving) media datastreams (like images) should be done at some other point (either before getting input from the text form or after).
A great set of slides to explain the form builder is at http://islandora.ca/sites/default/files/XML%20Form%20Builder.pdf
As I understood more of the ecosystem, I was both excited by the technology (The way Fedora stored data and how Islandora retrieved it was very interesting) but also wished there was better integration with the Drupal ecosystem. While some things cannot be completely fixed (like the generated form and its arrangement - Drupal Fields are more flexible but creating the equivalent would involve hundreds of fields and field collections), there are points where both the goals of Drupal and Islandora meet. Examples of this include:
- The Islandora Solr Views module. Very powerful (and works well). But perhaps working towards a larger goal like Sarnia (ie. Search API that can query and create views against *any* Solr server) would mitigate the double-work.
- The bookmarks module. Again, very powerful, but Drupal already has a solution with Flag. Work and integration between Flag and Islandora objects would actually be amazing!
- The community would greatly benefit from also having the modules up on Drupal.org. The ecosystem is primarily on github but Drupal has a powerful search mechanism which would help make it easier to find like-minded Islandora (and Drupal) developers.