December19
By: Alison Kerwin
As colleagues are packing up and leaving to start the Christmas break I thought I would reflect on my first year with Web Services at Bath…
In many ways 2008 feels like the year we got our house in order. Two teams merged, one new head, continuing cycle of maintenance and support but plenty of new initiatives and plans.
We’ve evaluated how we work together, looked at what we can do better, where we have gaps and where we do really well.
Next year will be huge for us as we embark on the development of a new external website for the University. Plans are already underway and we’re looking at significant changes with plenty of new initiatives coming to fruition. Alongside this we’ll be working in a different way – using agile development methodologies to ‘release early and often’ – we have ambitious plans in store.
For now though I wanted to focus on 2008, to look at our achievements and reflect on our highs (and lows):
The highs
- Development of an e-Prospectus; due for launch in January 09 – connecting with our Student Record System and allowing data to be output to create the print prospectus providing a much richer experience for the end user but also improve business processes for the University
- Moved the majority of our Academic sites into the CMS
- Brought in a new Web Designer – good to have you on board Liam!
- Get Creative – it was fun, it brought the team together and it introduced us to FIKA
- Put together (and had accepted) proposals for a new external website
- Delivered Web Sessions to the University community
- Moved from dSpace repository to ePrints (with the Library)
- (Soft) launched a blogging platform
- Developed a tinyurl and QR code generating service (with e-Learning)
The lows
- Sadly one of our colleagues retired in April. Jacki played a key role in the website for many years and it is regrettable she is no longer in the team
- As a new team we still have some way to go to establish ourselves and our position within the University. We believe the development of the new site will help us strengthen our profile
- Maintenance and support of the current site has prevented us from moving on as quickly as we’d have hoped but we have new arrangements in place for 2009 to allievate this
From a personal perspective it has been a challenging yet rewarding year. I have great admiration for the team and am confident we can meet and exceed our own expectations in 2009.
To all readers of this blog, best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Posted in: CMS, communication, development, team, tools, web sessions
As part of the latest sprint for the online prospectus, we looked at the possibility of reusing the Course Structure diagrams that are part of the printed brochure.
As the old adage goes, a picture paints a thousand words (and these pictures have words on them as well, so that’s probably something like a million words worth of content in each graphic…), so it was essential we found a way to use them online.
One issue we had to resolve was the legibility of the text contained within the diagrams when they were downscaled to work within a web browser – of particular concern was the fact that all the text was faced in a Serif font. A few hours of research and playing with real world examples and we came to the following conclusion: in general, there is no difference with legibility between Serif and Sans Serif fonts – it comes down to the end user’s familiarity with the font and therefore their ability to ‘interpret’ it. Alex Poole has published a really good essay on this matter.
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Posted in: CMS, design, development
December15
By: Kelvin Gan
We started using Struts 2 for the first time in our eProspectus project. In fact we’re using Hibernate/JPA+Spring+Struts2.
To me, one of the most obvious advantages that Struts 2 gave us was the ability to unit test our controllers. Before now, our project architecture usually consisted of Hibernate+Servlets+JSTL JSPs. We were only unit testing our model and DAO. Though there are ways for us to unit test Servlets, it’s not as straightforward as simply instantiating an action class and chucking a load of data at it. Servlets would require mocking up a request for example.
What I didn’t like though, was keeping track of what parameters were being passed in and what objects were loaded in the action classes. I often fell foul of writing tests that passed and seeing errors in the web app. It was simply because the params or the objects loaded for the action classes in the tests didn’t match up with the web app.
I think it’s simply a reflection of some of our (my!) action classes. Not breaking the OGNL debugger console would have probably really helped. We really liked that console.
The eProspectus project was also my first opportunity to use Java Annotations. Support for annotations were provided by Spring, Hibernate’s implementation of JPA and in Struts 2 action classes. Obviously, you’re no longer writing XML for your most of your configs (just a couple). So there aren’t masses of xml files that accompany each of your model classes for example – halving the number of files you’d have. The biggest win for me is being able to instantly see the config for a class in the code itself, rather than opening up a separate XMl file and switching between the two files. It just made life so much easier.
There was some pain in getting to grips with Struts 2, especially when we ignored the warnings in the docs that said certain features were experimental (I actually can’t remember what that was now…) but we’ve built up a significant amount of new knowledge and I’m especially happy to have Spring and JPA under my belt.
Posted in: development
December11
By: Alison Kerwin
Our Future of Web Apps (FOWA) feedback sessions are now complete. Over the last few months we’ve heard talks on subjects from OAuth to Getting Things Done, with CSS, Agile and Cloud Computing in between.
We’ve found the process very rewarding. It has allowed us to explore topics in more depth and as everyone has been assigned something it has been a real team effort. Andy Male and Phil Wilson selected our ‘homework’ with Phil chairing the sessions and chasing up those of us – me – who’ve had to re-schedule.
We’ve heard the saxophone courtesy of Tom Trentham (Activity Centred Design) and a balloon demo from Tom Natt (Open Social) – it has been different and informative and dare I say it – fun!
I’m sure it’ll be something we’ll do again. It certainly allows us to get more out of conference attendance and share our knowledge.
Our presentations and also useful links from FOWA are available from our wiki.
A special thanks to our colleague Craig Loftus (Mechanical Engineering) who also got involved and came to speak to us about Social Tagging.
Posted in: events, team
