Open Melodie

Open melodie 1.2 released

2011-04-10T23:04:00.000-07:00

This last version has several enhancements :

- bug fixes here and there, as usual ;

- I have rewritten all the orgainization of the import module. That leads to major improvments : the stress tests I have conducted show that the system is about 100 faster than the previous version, and is also much more reliable.

- the image module also got some attention. It is now possible to upload ZIP files containing JPEG images. The ZIP file is unzipped in the import folder automatically. No more one by one imports of many imags, just put them in a single ZIP file and you're done.

This version is already available on http://www.openmelodie.org/, and should be able on Sourceforge in the next few days.

Three screencasts on Open melodie

2011-01-19T13:43:00.000-08:00

I'm glad to announce that I published the first three screencasts on Open melodie.

The first one explains what Open melodie is about, and how it can help you putting your data online quickly and efficiently : http://www.openmelodie.org/

The two others are here http://www.openmelodie.org/channel. There you can learn how to register (1"30) and how to create a first corpus on a real set of data (15"). The example is a real corpus of 250 items, indexed in a few minutes using the importation tool.

The screencasts are in english (at least I tried...).

Have fun using Open melodie !

Open melodie goes live

2011-01-09T02:01:00.001-08:00

Happy new year to you all, I wish you a great 2011 year, full of happiness and healthiness.

I'm glad to announce the openning of http://www.openmelodie.org/ ! This is a major milestone in the development of this project, and we are all very excited about that.

This site holds all the resources available about Open melodie in one place (docs, pdfs, links to slides), and a public version of the application, that anybody can use freely.

For the moment, most of the resources are in french, I hope to have them translated soon. The application is localized in french and english, well at least mostly.

The version of the application is 1.1, several bugs have been fixed since the last publication of the source code, and several features (the registration process namely) has been changed, to ease the installation of the platform on 3rd party stites.

Feel free to post any comment, have fun using Open melodie !

Open melodie 1.0-RC1 released

2010-07-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

Being silent does not mean remaining inactive, at least it has not been the case for Open melodie ! After nearly a year without any news, I'm glad to announce the publication on Sourceforge of the 1.0-RC1. So no 0.5 (sorry), I also skipped the 0.6, then the 0.7, and found the project was mature enough to be a release candidate. I'll wait a few months more for bug fixes and stuff and package a 1.0-GA after that.

So what's new in this release ? They're so much... I'm not sure I wont forget anything.

First, the interface has been redone from bottom up. We only kept the basic SmartGWT

components and put them in a new layout. The interface is really nice now, much cleaner, less cluttered, I'm quite happy with it. Of course it will undergo another update in the next few months, because there's still room for improvement.

Second, all the core functionnalities of the engine are available through this interface. You can create basic stuff like thesauruses and controled values sets. You can add translations to your keywords in a very convenient way. And then you can build corpuses on those low-level data structures.

You are really free to build any kind of complex file structure in your corpuses : from basic string fields, to complex composite fields, everything is possible. I added the "relation field" that enables you to link objects from other corpuses to the current object.

Once your corpuses are built, you can begin to create objects in them. You can create and index them directly from the display grids, or open complex forms on them. Rich text is supported, we embedded the well-known CKEditor.

Of course the full support of high resolution images is in this release. Take an image, upload it, add fields to it, link to any number of objects, and you're done.

On the data browsing side, I could activate the advanced querying tool

available in SmartGWT, and it works really well ! It has been tested on 5000+ items corpuses, and despite the complexity of the queries entered, the response were instantaneous (well, as it can be over the Internet).

As far as testing is concerned, Open melodie has been online since mid-october '09 and used by non-computer science geek people since that time. Many bugs have been found and fixed, many performances issues have been improved. In those months, about 15 people have been using the server. They have created more than 50k items in a several hundreds of corpuses. There are now in the DB more than 220k indexed fields.

So yes, this 1.0-RC1 release really deserves this 1.0-RC1 status.

As usual, the code is on Sourceforge here (GPL licence) : Open melodie on Sourceforge. What I published are the Eclipse project. If you dont know what an Eclipse project is, it wont be of any use to you, so just drop me a line, and we'll see what can be done for you.

This project wont stop anytime soon, more things will be coming out when I'm back from vacation.

Open melodie in closed beta test

2009-11-18T10:29:00.001-08:00

I'm glad to announce that the closed beta test of Open melodie has begun this afternoon. It was quite a rush to install everything on a Linux box in time, especially due to a few sneaky configuration bugs here and there. Having Jersey to run on a Tomcat 5.0 may be a bit tricky, I also found a very amazing bug in the way Glassfish handles the EJB Interceptors.

So we are now close to the first beta release of the code base. We'll jump directly from v0.4 to v0.7, since I dont have enough time on my hands to package a v0.5. Too bad, but the v0.7 will be the first beta release, and we are all very excited about that.

From now on, the first Internet instance of Open melodie will run, and about 5-6 good souls are going to work with it, report bugs, suggest new features, so that we can improve the product.

Stay tuned for more news as things go on.

0.5 close to release

2009-09-16T05:27:00.001-07:00

I was planning to release a v0.5 before going on holydays, but the H1N1 cost me a good 2 weeks of work.

Anyway, the project is back on saddle, with a 0.5 version close to release. Expect some cool new features :

interfacing with Google spreadsheet for massive indexation, but also for the creation of thesaurus ;
image brower, handling of hires images through the interface ;
plus the usual bunch of bug fixes and enhancement of existing features.

In parallel, a beta version of the software is going to be deployed to be used in production on a few projects. This will be the first deployment of the platform in an openned environment. This experiment is planned to start in about a month.

Open melodie 0.4 released

2009-06-17T04:39:00.000-07:00

The fourth release of Open melodie is out on Sourceforge. One again, bug fixes, server side improvments (not much), and a lot of work on the client and its interface.

The client now exposes nearly all the item creation and indexation functionnalities. You can :

create archives ;
create corpuses in archives ;
create thesauruses, controled valued sets ;
create field types (all the defined kinds of field types are supported) ;
add field types to corpuses, to create indexation patterns ;
create items in corpuses and index them following the patterns for that corpus.

You can work on thesauruses and controled values sets :

create keywords or controled values ;
create parent / child relations between them.

There are stilll many things to expose in this interface, among them :

representation support (esp. for very hires images) ;
item and representation sets administration ;
profiles support.

The server already supports these functionnalities.

Another feature that has been added is the connection to Google spreadsheets document. Open melodie is able to massively import corpuses from Google spreadsheets. Expect to see this functionnality in the next release. In this version, there is only the very start of it : a session can acquire a Google token to access the user's spreadsheets.

The next version is scheduled to be released by the end of july.

Openmelodie 0.3 released

2009-05-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

The third version of Open melodie is out on Sourceforge. This is the third release of Openmelodie, with more bug fixes, improvments, cool new features, etc...

In 0.2, the thechnology to be used to build the web interface had been chosen : GWT. A second one had to be chosen, and I spent quite some time between GXT and Smart client. The latter got it, mainly due to better documentation, and especially better examples in their showcase. This toolbox is really amazing, and allowed me to quickly build a rather complex interface. I love the notion of Datasource built in SmartClient, even it's a bit tricky to warp a GWT server in such a DS. Once it's done, it's very pleasant to use, and works well.

Not everything is in this interface yet, let's first list what is in it :

basic user registration,
archive creation,
nearly all the artefacts that can be built in an archive are active : corpuses, thesauruses, controled values set, field types. Still missing are items and images sets.

What is not in this interface : - item creation and indexation,

set creation, and interactions with items,
security management.

I hope to finish the next release before summer, expect to see those three last points in it. Once all this is done, the interface will be remade, with some nice design, ergonomy (I wouldnt call what is done now "ergonomy", so it wont be "ergonomy improvment").

Open melodie 0.2 released

2009-02-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

The second version of Open melodie is out on Sourceforge. This second release includes a redesign of the transport layer to fit GWT as the underlying technology for the presentation layer. This redesign allowed me to use the exact same transport layer code in the EJB layer, the servlet layer, and the GWT layer, thus saving quite some development time.

The major difficulty of this development was not really Java related, nor GWT related. In fact it was Maven - GWT related... Everything was compiling fine, the GWT compilier was happy with all the classes it had to translate, and building a WAR file was ok too (using home made build.xml). But ... the GWT hosted mode, with a Maven handled classpath was not working at all, with very odd Tomcat exceptions. Removing the Maven classpath, and providing a hand made one fixed the issue. Oh well...

The next release is schedule for the end of the month (maybe mid-march) and will include the first bits of the GUI part. This point is the one we are working on at the moment.

Open melodie goes GWT

2008-12-14T11:56:00.000-08:00

After very long thoughts about what technology to use to build the interface of Open melodie, we decided to use GWT. Reasons are quite easy to understand : we all wish to have a rich interface, with many features like the MAVI has. Going Flash would have raised problems, especialy on the long term maintenance. I'm not sure using plain JS libraries, like Dojo, Scriptaculous, Prototype and the like doesnt make a lot of sense to me, considering what you can do in GWT, with Smart GWT or Ext GWT on your side. So this is what we decided.

I have already rewrote the transport layer, to use it as is in the GWT layer. Now I need to write a GWT server layer. I would like it to implement the EJB-interface layer, that should be renamed to something like Server-interface, since it will be implemented in both the GWT layer, and the EJB layer. Being able to organize things like that seems really cool to me !

Expect a 0.2 release in january 09 with all this in it.

Open melodie in Softpedia

2008-12-10T07:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the folks in Softpedia for bringing Open melodie to their site. Just one minor thing : they tagged it as a Linux project. Since the code in Java, you can run it on Windows without any problem.

Link : http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Archiving/Open-Melodie-43505.shtml

First Open melodie release

2008-12-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

I just released the first version of Open melodie on Sourceforge, you can check it here : http://openmelodie.sourceforge.net. Right now it's under GPL licence, once the project reaches something that pleases me, it might go more industry-friendly. The version is 0.1, but dont be fooled by that low number. The core platform has already been heavily tested. There are still many bugs to fix, many things to improve here and there, but we're on the right tracks.

So after one year of work, what is there in this release ? Well, nearly eveything.

In fact, the MAVI could be transported on the Open melodie platform right now. All we need is some more funding and / or manpower to do that.

I still need to add one important feature, that allows one to precisely specify what can be displayed and what wont be displayed out of an item file. This is a feature we add in the MAVI, at a very late stage, but that is important to have.

What is on the roadmap now ?

Apart from that feature, the next big step will be to put the core features in a interface. This interface is already under development, the design looks nice already, although it's not finished. GWT will most probably be used to build it, so we'll be able to have advanced graphics and user experience, just as in the MAVI, without having to write Flash code.

Once this is done, we'll be able to host our first projects. The MAVI of course, several other projects from the College de France, and some others (I hope). This will be the first part of the activity on the platform.

The development of the core platform will continue, I want to intergrate features like RSS announcements, XML interfacing with OAI-PMH harvesters, and collaborative work features that will be needed by team projects.

I will let you know how things will be going on.

What is Open Melodie ?

2007-09-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Maybe my first post on this blog should explain that !

Open Melodie is the name I gave to an effort to bring the software I used in the Musée Achéménide for the open source community. And hopefully, it will also be the name of this software, in its open source form.

The Musée Achéménide in a nutshell, for those who dont know what it is (I guess there are many !), is an epic effort to bring online all the artefacts from the Aechemenid period, online, with scientific documentation and high resolution photos when they are available.

And when I say "high resolution", it's really "high". In fact, some of the images are about 500M pixels in size, which is really huge. I'm not sure we can find such images anywhere else on the Internet.

If you want to learn more about this museum, you can :

- visit it here : http://www.museum-achemenet.college-de-france.fr.

- download a presentation of the project in PDF in french and in english.

The Open Melodie project will be divided in several modules. The first to be released will be Melodie-images, the Java API that makes possible the access to the highres images. This is the easy part. We are very close (I guess a few weeks) to this realease.

Then Melodie-data will be released after that. This will be harder, because the way the data is handled in the base is very special, due to the origin of the data. I'll make another post to describe that in more details. It will also incur a major rewrite of the code, which is based on old and obsolete APIs, like EA versions of JAXB, totally uncompatible with the one we have now, etc...

Any kinds of comments, thoughts, advice, concerns, feedback of any sort, about this project and these APIs will of course be most welcomed !