SeeAlso simplicity

At the ECDL 2008 conference I had the chance to talk to Jakob Voss. His idea of making it very simple (nearly no programming skills required) for libraries to dynamically enrich their catalouge/records with related third party content – like links to Wikipedia – seems very good and much needed. We already dynamically integrate third party content so what really caught my eye was the very nice and clean way Jakob has implemented his SeeAlso link server solution. I will not get into the nitty gritty now but we will certainly take a closer look at this. If you are interested in Jakob’s work you can check out the SeeAlso simple specification and the Open Source reference implementation of SeeAlso server and clients (Perl and JavaScript).

Wroommm and we have lift-off!

So, the word is out. Summa 1.0 hit the web.

It has been a great ride to develop Summa over the past years and a joy to finally have something to show the world.

Somehow I can’t help but (humbly, very humbly) compare it to the launch of a certain hadron collider in a solar system  near you. Summa 1.0 is not up to full power yet, we have not flipped all the switches on yet. That will come trickling in over the next minor releases from now.

We’ve spend a long time designing and writing the individual components that make up Summa. All the core stuff is enabled for 1.0, like duh, searching – but also more blingy features like facet generation is switched on. I can’t wait until we will switch on the turbo boosters in the form of the fully distributed workflow and really start to flex our advanced filtering framework.

Here’s to the future.

On the edge

Friday afternoon and Summa 0.9 is being pushed out of the door. The past days have been hectic and the gods of software releases felt that it would be humorous to add sick kids into the mix. Nevertheless the thing actually builds, it actually ingests and, lo and behold, it actually searches. With a web-interface and faceting. We’ll let it simmer over the weekend to allow for the possibility of late-night testing being more interesting than Real Life, then promote it to 1.0 by monday.

Step by step

We are already well on our way towards our next Summa milestone which is 0.9.0 and slated for this Tuesday.

It is quite exciting times actually, as we are now assembling the bits and pieces we have been coding and designing over the past year(s). It is no secret that it has sometimes felt like sitting in the middle of huge puzzle trying to snap together four pieces of the total 10.000 pieces.

These days we get to stand a bit further back and assemble the smaller chunks we did in the past, and get glimpses of the final big picture. It seems to fit together nicely.

The things scheduled to hit 0.9.0 are among others:

• Sample run over an OAI harvested data set (ingest, index, and search). Until now we’ve only used smaller test sets.
• Enabling of the Facet Browser
• Exposing our interfaces as web services
• A very simple test website using the web services
• Remote deployment and management of services and clients

Anyway, still tonnes of work to do. No time to blog!

Java f#!*….. script

Working on a renew book feature for Summa. Once the renewal process is successfully completed,  I need to add one month to a Javascript timestamp to calculate  the new return date for the material in question.

Easy… just do something like:

return new Date(timestamp).addMonth(1);

Well, no. Do:

var date = new Date(timestamp);
date.setMonth(date.getMonth() + 1);

Fair enough. But if the current month is December, the f… year doesn’t change when I add a month. I need to do a manual year update.

Summa is relying heavily on the Prototype javascript framework, but it sadly lacks any date related features. The same goes for jQuery, as far as I can see.

So javascript may be en vogue right now, but sometimes it’s a pain.

Summa Milestone 0.8.0

Just pushed milestone release 0.8.0 to the Summa project site. It is still not a functional search engine as such, but is getting closer each day. At a breath taking pace I might add. Code is landing on trunk by boat loads.

If you are very keen on seeing where we are grab the binary release and run through the tutorial. Feedback is very welcome on the summa-devel list.

Back to work. Summa 1.0 is getting closer by the hour!