We’ve been working with some interested groups, in order to get CAREO “out there,” and I’m just trying to get a better handle on what our potential end-user institutions need from a repository server.
UPDATE: Please provide feedback on this, even (especially?) if you agree with the assumptions. Clarity is a Good Thing.
Here’s the assumptions we’ve been working under. Institutions will need to (in no particular order):
Host their own instance of the repository (or have it hosted by another group)
I was just tweaking the “Add Object” page for the MedCIS installation of CAREO, when I noticed that the funky cross-browser-window communication used to update the location of the uploaded file in the IMS Metadata record was failing.
Safari didn’t help, it just borked silently. I fired up Mozilla Firebird, and it did the same thing. Tried Mozilla (the Full Meal Deal) and opened up the Javascript Console (Tools: Web Development: Javascript Console) and cest voila! There’s the problem! Had it fixed in about 30 seconds after that.
After a little while spent spinning wheels, we’ve gotten the MedCIS integration of CAREO back on track.
It turns out that it may have been a minor config oops, where CAREO was directed to use a URL that may have had intermittent (or otherwise badly behaving) DNS, so the XML-RPC requests were barfing all over the place, for various reasons.
I changed that instance of CAREO to use 127.0.0.1 as the host to use for the JUDURL parameter, and all appears fine now. Absolutely weird, since it shouldn’t make a bit of difference.
I just found out that I’ll be heading to WWDC2003 this year (June 23 - 27).
This is the most amazing conference I’ve seen, with an extremely diverse mix of folks (from MS R&D to indy developers). The sessions are all top-knotch, and it’s more than a little like drinking from a firehose. Can’t wait to see what’s coming in MacOSX (I remember the Quartz Extreme demo last year, and that was freakin’ amazing…) and WebObjects specifically.
I’m just going through some presentations on EOF, so I can help King with some work he’s doing on implementing a native XML database in CAREO.
A one-liner at the end of a WWDC2000 presentation on Advanced EOF says it all. “Work with EOF, not against it.” Thanks to Eric Noyau and Josh Fagans for the presentation!
For the current implementation of the connection from CAREO to the ALOHA Metadata Server, I use the XML-RPC API, and treat CAREO as a client application of the metadata server. Instead of using EOF to manage the records natively, I spun my own record management and caching solution (which works pretty well, but can’t hold a candle to some enterprise level caching being actively developed by a Large Company - so why don’t I just use that?)
I was emailed a virus over the weekend, and didn’t even know it was malicious. It was rendered harmless by the Perfect Virus Killing Machine.
I run MacOSX. Windows virii are ineffective. I’ve never had a virus infect any of my macs. Ever. Sure, I’ve received copies of Windows virii, which I dutifully delete so they don’t infect those on Lesser Systems, but they’ve never managed to do anything other than clog my inbox for a second or two.
The latest version of the LC website just went live. Mostly a restructuring of content, so it’s easier to find stuff without having to decipher which section it might be in. This is using more CSS to handle the layout (at least for the navigation portion), so we’ll see how the old, crappy Netscape 4.7 that is still the institutional standard here holds up (rumour has it we’re going to make the leap to Mozilla in September. Can’t WAIT to drop support for a browser crafted in 1996!)
I’m playing around with XQuery, and am finding it to be quite powerful. Still getting my head around the FLWR syntax, and what I can do with that, but initial pokings are quite promising. Thanks a LOT to Leif and Jim at Bluestream for guiding me through the first steps. Their XStreamDB is quite a nice XML database, and handles XQuery natively.
Anyway, here’s the query that has evolved from the first early steps. It pokes through the XML database for all documents that contain a element, and returns a set of elements describing some stuff I’ll need to display the item in a search result page.
I’m playing around with XStreamDB, and am really impressed with it so far. Relatively fast queries, doing stuff that would bring our current metadata database to its knees.
One thing I’m realizing is that I’m a complete dumb newbie when it comes to XQuery. Sure, I understand some of the concepts, but implementing the queries and the syntax etc… is a bit much right now. I’m working on that, to be sure, but there seems to be a big gaping hole on the ’net (and the bookstore) on decent, usable XQuery documentation.
Thanks to Apple, the Learning Commons was seeded with a shiney new TiBook for CAREO development. I’ve adopted it, replacing the older PB G4/400 that I had been using. What a difference. Wow. Really.
This thing has a speedy 1GHz G4, half a gig of RAM, 60GB hard drive, and a built in Superdrive (CD-R, DVD-R combo drive). Holy crap, that’s just plain nice. Before, I’d have to lug out a big, bulky external firewire CD-R drive to do my weekly backups (I use .Mac Backup every Friday morning to back up ~/Documents, Mail, Preferences, and a few other things). Now, I just insert the blank disk into the slot on the front of the machine… Nice. I just did a quick backup of some other stuff, and it struck me how elegant that really is.
Thanks to