Archive for April, 2008
Lots of great Open Source and Community Source work was showcased at JA-SIG this week. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the most interesting, most relevant projects for me:
collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections.
software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.
rich media analytics for humanists and artists.
DSpace repository using the Manakin XMLUI. A comprehensive digital library of public policy research.
guidelines for the interaction of tools with learning/course management systems. This is really about decoupling functionality from any single LMS. It would create a more pluggable model, enabling faculty or students to be application producers and Learning Management Systems and other applications to be consumers.
collaborative project for developing and distributing a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications. Fluid is not only developing component libraries, but is also churning out research, education, and outreach about how to design user experiences.
discover who at Cornell is working on a particular research topic; what they’ve taught or published recently; where facilities might be and what online tools are available to expedite research. Powered by RDF and Semantic Web technologies.
April 30th, 2008
Mark Diggory
Look & Feel
Branding
- Repository
- Communities
- Collections
- Items
Visualization
- Interpret metadata
- Link metadata
- can serialize metadata to JSON
Share
Tiers
-
Style Tier
- Simple themes
- XHTML + CSS
- Theme Tier
- Complex themes
- XSL + XHTML + CSS
- Aspect Tier
- Introducing new content into pipeline
- Introducing new functionality
- Cocoon + Java
Resources
Documentation
- DSpace manual
- Theme writing tutorial
- Mailing Lists
Cocoon
- DSpace will use Spring-based Cocoon in future
- Understand the Cocoon Pipeline. Manakin imposes another model on top of Cocoon (themes, styles, aspects)
- DRI Schema - Abstract representation of a repository page
- Metadata elements
- Structural elements
- defines logical structure for rendering content
Aspects:
- Applied to all pages (even if they don’t add anything to page)
- DRI abstracts away characteristics to be rendered later in HTML (”highlighting” for bold, italics, etc.)
- DRI -> XHTML default template in Manakin (base XSL library). Custom XSL overrides templates in base.
- Aspects apply transforms to the DRI
- Base XSL library:
- Package
- Structural display
- Metadata handlers - generally broken up into Lists and Views
- SummaryList
- SummaryView
- DetailedList
- DetailedView
- Have access to all the Request Objects and methods throughout the Aspect chain.
- Themes should ideally be packaged up as webapp overlays
April 30th, 2008
Mark Diggory, MIT
Upgrading Version 1.4.2 to Version 1.5.x
Pre-session chat/gripes about inadequacy/orphan status of stats module.
1.5.1 coming out soon
Code Reorg
- Build downloads a dependency
- pom.xml represent the modular, distributed dependency model. For parents and dependencies, if artifacts aren’t found on local server, Maven will look for them in the central repository (cloud) and pull them down for the build process.
- Use distribution package (not source). Only reason for using source package is to make significant modifications to build process or Java Virtual Machine requirements. Instead customizations should be done against the
- Each module is a Maven Project. Can provide “overlays” for modules. Modify code in “target\”? Target files are what get built to WAR
Configuration
- New Configurability
- Stackable Authentication
- Configurable Browse
- Configurable Submission
- Separate New Module Configurations
- Maintain configuration files in CVS
- for upgrade, use CVS to compare local config file to original 1.4.1 file, then copy those properties over to appropriate place in 1.5 (contrary to original 1.5 documentation)
- Stackable authentication changes
- in config, org.dspace.eperson is changed to org.dspace.authenticate
- Configurable Browse
- Database schema changes (new/dropped tables and columns) - more intelligent about how it manages the datastore in the dbConsider contributing to DSpace documentation
Planning
- Backup everything often
- database
- (sql db dump) /usr/bin/pg_dump –create –oids\ -U postgres -f backup.sql dspace
- customizations, configuration, app directory
- ${assetstore.dir}…${assetstore.dir(N)}
- more…
- assetstore
- disaster recovery
- Track customizations
- MIT created package import support for OpenCourseware content packages.
- Map migration path
- Ask questions!
- Practice alot
- MIT does upgrade repeatedly to ensure everything works before going to production
Upgrade:
- Building w/ Maven
- Installing w/ Ant
- Upgrading Database
- Rebuilding Search/Browse
Development
- Eclipse setups available on http://wiki.dspace.org
- Maven plugins for Eclipse
- Process (Mark demos upgrade)
- drop in customized JSPs from 1.4 to dspace1.5/dspace/modules/jspui/src/main/webapp/layout
- add in config changes from 1.4 one at a time
- terminal: navigate to dspace/ and use Maven to build
- build.xml works differently, [ant update] now updates more directories. Can add entries to backup all directories (config.bak, bin.bak, lib.bak, webapps.bak directories) before it builds new ones
- install with Ant
- can configure Tomcat to point to WARs in webapps/ instead of copying files over to Tomcat
- update database using postgres/bin/psql
- Events system logs events like editing, addition of bitstreams
- Tim Donohue has tutorial for Configurable Submission system
- 1.5 branch on SVN repository is probably a better bet for getting bug fixes, build process fixes, etc. than the release on the web site, i.e.most 1.5.1 changes are already in the 1.5 branch
- SWORD, LNI can be used to ingest packages from FTP “drop-box” via remote client. Enables remote or batch import without having direct access to the server.
April 30th, 2008
I’m at JA-SIG, St. Paul. It’s winding down today with some sessions, a BarCamp and a uCamp. I’m looking forward to the uCamp. Overall, it has been a good conference, probably not as relevant for me personally as the Open Repositories Conference, but still very useful. And it’s inspiring to see these different projects and developer groups talking to each other and learning from each other.
I’ve had the privilege of hanging out with Mark Diggory a bit as well as other DSpace cohorts and some of the Fedora guys. The comaradie between the Fedora and DSpace folks is encouraging. It’s a relief to know that I’m not the only one that admires Fedora’s content model and wonders why DSpace should try to reinvent that with it’s “2.0″ vision versus adopting Fedora as a storage and web services layer and benefiting from a shared developer base. As one of the Fedora stakeholders put it, we could really turn the heat up on Microsoft by taking advantage of the best of both platforms.
Community Source and Open Source software development is thriving in the academic space. Collaborate or die!
I’ll be posting my notes from JA-SIG 2008 over the next couple of days. They’ll be raw, probably incoherent and fraught with errors, but there you are.
April 30th, 2008
I just came across Cleveland Public Library’s site featured on drupalib. They’ve done some very nice design work. Their use of “Premium” as a paradigm for describing research databases is both catchy and sensible.
April 9th, 2008