The idea was to have a site that contains news items written by the people for the people primarily living and working in Brighton and Hove area.

Key areas of development:

• Plugin Development
• Events
• Social Networking (Twitter/Facebook Connect integration)
• SEO

The GabFire NewsPro theme was used as the basis for style – with considerable modification to allow for required functionality. The BHFP logo was provided by a designer – I was responsible for styling the rest of the site to fit with the logo colour scheme.

Visit the site: http://www.brightonandhovefreepress.co.uk

• Video Gallery (YouTube API)
• Google news auto-blogging (Google API)
• RSS feeds
• SEO (Wordpress plugin)

The Swift theme was used as the basis for style – with only slight adjustment needed for colour and branding.

Overall I was amazed how quickly a media-rich site can be built up using CMS/blogging frameworks such as Wordpress. The plethora of community contributed plugins and themes add to the value of such technology – however, for production there will always be the need for adjustments to the majority of free code that is available.

Visit the site: http://www.practicalboating.com

• Dates: January, 2009 – December, 2009
• Technology: Java EE 5, EJB 3.0, JPA, JSF, JQuery, UDDI and Web Services
• Responsibility: Architecting and building the infrastructure

Overview

The Redsquid framework was a Java Enterprise framework that bound together a number of web applications and modules. The core Redsquid application was responsible for rendering the front page content, static wiki content, user management, sitemap and the myAds utilities. Several Redsquid modules were also developed to provide functionality for other sections of the website including Archsearch, Archives and the CMS 2.0. These modules were all built from a JSF/JSP template reference application.

JSPWiki

The JSPWiki engine was used to provide wiki-based management of the static content of the webiste. The two classes providing the core support for use within Redsquid were as follows:

• WikiController – an Application scope bean that contains the JSPWiki engine. Responsible for parsing, saving, deleting, attaching wiki content.
• WikiPageBean – a backing-bean to hold information relating to current page (section, subsection, page, title, content, author)

Apcahe SOLR

Apache SOLR was used to provide faceted classification indexing for various elements used within Redsquid including Site Search, Archsearch and Archives.

Open Blue Dragon

The Open Blue Dragon engine was embedded to provide the rendering ability for ADS ColdFusion based Special Collection interfaces.

Redsquid EJBs

• UserManagerEJB – responsible for maintaining user sessions, creating/updating user details and logging user events.
• FrameworkEJB – responsible for rendering top / tail elements of a Redsquid webapp and managing the Redsquid Sitemap.

Redsquid Components

JSF/JSP taglib to communicate with EJB’s from within modules. The current set of tags are as follows:

• Banner
• Footer
• Menu
• Submenu

Utility tags:

• RSS

Redsquid Filters

• SSOFilter – binds a web application to the Redsquid system as follows:

1. 1. Query the UserManagerEJB and determine the current logged in user based on SSOSESSIONID cookie information.
   2. If not logged in create an anonymous user.
   3. Query the FrameworkEJB and determine the security constraints assigned to the current page request if any.
   4. If User has access permission for page request continue, else redirect to Redsquid login-in page.
   5. Inject user into request to be available for use by web application.

Redsquid session management was handled by creating a cookie called SSOSESSIONID with a path of “/”. The UserManagerEJB then assigns the SSOSESSIONID to a UserBean object that is then persisted to a database.

Visit the BETA version of the site: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk

• Dates: September 2007 to September 2009
• Technology: Java EE 5, Apache SOLR
• Responsibility: Ontology/Thesauri and data preparation, interface development, integration with Redsquid architecture.

The first aim was to index the ADS database of over one million metadata records describing sites and monuments in the UK, according to three criteria: When, What and Where. The project used the techniques of faceted classification, derived from information science and demonstrated in the Archaeobrowser project, to allow users to easily and intuitively navigate the ‘three-dimensional space’ created by the classification scheme. A map-based interface was developed to allow the spatial dimension to be best explored.

Secondly the project employed natural language processing (NLP) that allowed automated tools to search within documents for terms which are part of known classification schemes, adding them to the faceted index, and providing much deeper and richer access to unpublished archaeological literature.

Thirdly, these tools were also employed to investigate whether it was also possible to identify and harvest index terms within older antiquarian literature as represented by back runs of archaeological journals currently being digitised and being made available online. Natural language processing allowed the recognition and harvesting of place names which were then supplied to existing services (GeoCrossWalk) which could look up the names in an online gazetteer of names and return precise grid coordinates which were added to the index.

Visit the project website: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/archaeotools

• Dates: 2008 to 2009
• Technology: Java EE 5, JPA, JSF, JQuery, OpenLayers, WMS/WFS
• Responsibility: Integration of two existing databases into a more efficient, extensible data structure. Interface and back-office development.

Visit the ERA website: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/era