Andrew’s Blog

I finally got down to making some progress on the new VT web app today.  This was mainly thanks to staying late at the department (still there now actually) due to it being Mesude’s birthday! I’m currently expecting Henry to turn up any minute so we can go down to Zizzi’s to celebrate.

Anyway, this morning I converted some of our old undergraduate projects to Mercurial and put them on the VT server.  You can now find the demonstrators system and the Recursive Meta Scraper there.  DCS Central is the name of the new project; a rather pompous name at the moment for what essentially is a small Java class I wrote ages ago to query the departmental printers and an XSL stylesheet which generates our current people listing on the VT website.

This currently only happens via a static XML file.  The next thing to do is to get a Java servlet firstly to do the processing (as opposed to the web browser) and then to make the XML generation dynamic, taking the people list from a database.  Finally, we add some stuff to the web app to allow us to modify this database.  And as a result the VT web site hopefully becomes a shade more maintainable.

There are still a few things missing from the stylesheet.  We don’t yet handle RAs and research students, but this shouldn’t be too different from the academics. The main addition is that students need a supervisor list and a thesis title.  The latter will eventually link to a longer blurb pulled from rmission.  I’m in two minds about including academic rmissions.  Most of their work should be maintained in projects which will also eventually be listed via vt.

There are also a few other modifications.  We need to allow the default makeperson URL to be overridden, mainly so alumni can be listed.  Alumni will only really differ in being listed on a separate page, so they should be able to use the same stylesheet and just be generated from a different link which does a different database query.

At least there are real results from this at last and not just ideas in my head!

Well yesterday turned out not to be a hacking day at all, but rather a day dismantling VT and installing a new disk (80gb from support).  It’s not yet active (we need some more downtime to setup the new disk, and move data back and forth) but it should mean we have a lot more room to breathe!  Thanks to Simon for his help with the beast; getting a new hard disc into a desktop case proved to be a very non-trivial process!

Today marks the start of hacking on the new VT web application. IcedTea6 and Tomcat are now available on VT, along with a wiki. I’ve also asked support to set up a vtdevel@ alias for us so I can keep track of who is using and abusing VT. The code for the web application will be hosted in VT’s mercurial repositories as usual.

Some planned features:

• Generate some of the really dumb ™ VT web pages, like the people and project lists.
• Generate publications lists from the publications database via George’s corporate author hack.
• Handle seminar announcements
• Monitor lab resources

Feedback welcomed.

Also a quick reminder to all that Google Summer of Code 2008 applications now close on the 7th of April. Hopefully we will have some successful students from UniShef this year.