All entries for Sunday 28 December 2008

December 28, 2008

WiMIC Browser v.3 – MySQL, BlazeDS, Lucene, Spring, Flex 3.0, Cairngorm

Follow-up to WiMIC Browser v.2 – migrated to Adobe Flex Cairngorm application framework from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I've taken advantage of some new technologies to redevelop the Women in Modern Irish Culture data browser. The application will eventually give full online access to a big biographical and bibliographical database developed by researchers at Warwick and University College Dublin. The last version was rather over-complicated and ponderous, giving slow and awkward access to the data. This new version provides a much more instantaneous view onto the thousands of records. It is now really a data browser rather than just a search tool. Researchers can immediately scan through thousands of records, which are all immediately loaded into data grids. Whereas the old version served up 12 records at a time as a result of database queries via JSON, the new version can serve up over 9000 records in a few seconds, using the highly efficient BlazeDS mechanism.

Rapid data browsing with BlazeDS

This is how it works:

  1. the Flex/Flash interface calls a method on a Remote Object that will return an ArrayCollection of Author objects;
  2. the RemoteObject proxies through to a corresponding method in a class exposed via BlazeDS;
  3. the Java method is in fact a Spring bean which queries the database using Spring's jdbc utils (the data is now on MySQL rather than SQL Server);
  4. Spring builds a Flash Remoting ArrayCollection of Author objects (corresponding to my Flex Author class);
  5. the ArrayCollection is returned as the result of the proxied method using the effiiciently compressed AMF protocol;
  6. the ArrayCollection is added to the Flex Cairngorm model, to which the datagrid is bound;
  7. the data appears in the grid, and can be browsed and re-ordered instantly.

Even when retrieving all 9000+ authors, that only takes a few seconds.

The authors are listed in an AdvancedDataGrid, allowing the researcher to drill down into a selected record. This retrieves further data about the selected author (using BlazeDS) including a list of publications.

Fast and smart querying with Lucene

In addition, I have used the Lucene Java library to add query interfaces that search pre-built indexes. Lucene performs free-text and exact searching as required, and also uses synonyms. So, for example, a researcher could search for "Dublin AND poetry" in the simple search form, and see almost instantly all authors with the words "Dublin" AND "poetry" in their records (including their publications). It would also list records containing "poem" and "poems", giving them a lower ranking in the results.

To be even more precise, one can search for "Locations:Dublin AND Genres:poetry" which would return only authors of poetry with some association with Dublin. "Locations" and "Genres" being fields in the Lucene index. I'm using that mechanism to create a search interface with specific fields such as "genre", "surname", "firstname", "publication title" and "location".

As with other queries, BlazeDS is used for highly efficient transmission of results.

A further addition, again using BlazeDS and Lucene, is the ability to list authors who had published in a selected decade. Each author record in the Lucene index contains a list of the decades in which they published. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by viewing all authors to have published since 2000.

Now that I have all of these elements in place, I'll be able to quickly add more features and richer data, including more information on publications.

Try it out here.


Robert O'Toole : 28 Dec 2008 21:47 |  Tags:          |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Project plan: future platforms for mobile, blended, research based learning

Follow-up to Abstract for a presentation on future development in support of mobile research based learners from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

IDCM MA is the International Design and Communication MA on which I have been teaching, and which has given me opportunities to try new teaching techniques. It is also the driver behind many of my new ideas.

Click to enlarge...

Future platforms project plan


Robert O'Toole : 28 Dec 2008 10:03 |  Tags:     |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem