Open melodie 0.2 released

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

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

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

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 ?

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 !