CARP Core has been in continuous development for almost four years now. It has grown to encompass 27,025 lines of code across 10 submodules. Currently, it is used to host two independent research platform infrastructures: in academia as CACHET’s Central Nervous System and in industry as iMotion’s Mobile Research Platform.
While the framework is in active use, it still only incorporates a small subset of all the envisioned functionality identified as part of early requirements elicitation. Therefore, fundamental functionality is still being added with each new release and major breaking changes are common.
So far, stabilizing the APIs has not been a priority. Over the course of 35 alpha releases, changes have been decided based on feedback from both CACHET and iMotions and it has been possible to perform upgrades in close collaboration.
However, such a close collaboration is not possible with all developers and becomes problematic as the project scales up. Luckily, CARP Core has reached a certain level of maturity and we feel confident we have identified the necessary requirements for a stable 1.0 release. Our current efforts are fully geared towards this release which you can track on our public milestone.