When do term weeks start?!

Monday, or Sunday?!

• go.warwick.ac.uk/timetable says Monday…
• Student Cinema says Sunday
• My gut instinct always says Sunday…
• Week 10 Finishes on a Saturday (so what happened to Sunday between 10&11)
• RaW's minidisc-booking sheet starts on a Saturday! (Thanks Chris Doidge!)
• Argh!!!
  …more examples welcome

: 07 Feb 2006 16:05 |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Mahusive Update

Writing about web page http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/paulstacey

OK, bringing up to speed with this project:

1. Now using Moodle, for many reasons. Listing that below this list.
2. Working to get Shibboleth login to the project (this should allow integration with the WSOS)
3. Going to simulate timetable interpretation from the system (BSV tables are available; write a program to interpret these!)
4. "Penguin" folder to be created, in order to put our custom front page. This will be moved as the project progresses.
5. Term Dating now begun (see next post!)

Reasons why I'm using Moodle now:

1. PHP is faster to develop with, yet scalable (Moodle is being used for the open university, see here: Large Moodle Installations
2. Personally, much more comfortable with PHP
3. Java was taking more time than I could commit to understand existing open source projects
4. No point in re-inventing the wheel
5. Moodle has more documentation (the current open source JSP solutions seem to want to have you hire them, funny that)
6. More suited to Department of Computer Science's needs (the LMSs in JSP were designed for university-wide use, and separation wasn't possible because of the security grainings)
7. Downside: Non-transactional database commital using mySQL at the moment.
8. Downside: Variable protection is not so "hot" in PHP. A big issue, but the guidelines for moodle should stop variable transferrance. Also, splitting into classes helps!
9. Greater integration with existing systems possible

: 07 Feb 2006 15:33 |  Tags: Coding Design Moodle PHP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Update: Week 3

Have chosen to use Jetspeed-2 to run the portal on, because it reduces the need to build everything from scratch – and should allow me to concentrate on making it work for DCS. I am currently looking into the portlet creation, and also into the integration of the back end into existing systems (no mean task!)

: 16 Jan 2006 20:20 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Java : Word2HTML

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone knows of any Java code that can automatically convert Word documents into readable HTML, like groupwise does? Just might have some influence on the portal, tis all…

Thanks in advance!

David

: 24 Nov 2005 17:17 |  Tags: HTML Java JSP Word |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Front end integration

Writing about web page http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/paulstacey

Having discussed front and back end integration with Paul today, the following points arose:

• Coffee is good
• Work is bad
• The use of the MVC and JSP format will allow a high level of abstraction between the front and back end
• This will, in turn, allow development of the back end without too much impact on the front end
• However, the front end research will have some bearing of the code design & output, so any code design must be expandable and changeable
• Hopefully this will be done through the use of the beans anyway!

Any coments on any analysis thoroughly appreciated.

Timetable
Roughly still on schedule with each other – no major changes. Parallel working will occur the start of the new term.

: 24 Nov 2005 16:00 |  Tags: Design Diary Frontend JSP MVC |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

JSP – Site Structure

Hi all,

Just wondered what people might suggest for a JSP style site structure? I'm fairly new to JSP, but have been a PHP developer for ages… is it usually better to go for a Joomla style "index.jsp" which calls modules, or to get modules directly?

Any sort of best practices appreciated… my gut instinct would be to have "index.jsp" calling the relevant page, but I'm open to ideas…

David

: 22 Nov 2005 18:27 |  Tags: JSP MVC Website Design |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

JSP – MVC

Hi all,

Any JSP designers out there? If you see this, firstly, hello :)

I just want some clarification on whether MVC is the way forward, and if so, does anyone have any great examples? The books I've got aren't great :S

One of the biggest questions I've got is whether you have to use a servlet, or can you use a standard JSP page, and redirect, if so, avoiding the requestDispatcher and instead using instead?!

Thanks in advance!!!

: 22 Nov 2005 18:25 |  Tags: JSP MVC |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Current Status

Current state of play

Unfortunately, this project hasn't really had a lot of output – I'm currently reading and sifting through lots of different materials, trying to decide best how to go about this project.

I have a couple of questions, but I'll put that on another post – hopefully people won't get bored by that one!

: 22 Nov 2005 18:22 |  Tags: Development Diary JSP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Welcome

Welcome to the penguin blog – a collection of blogs for the new penguin project, a combination of 2 projects in DCS

: 27 Oct 2005 10:30 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem