Ridiculously well integrated IDE and Application

This week I have been playing around a lot with Eclipse, which is an Integrated Development Environment platform, geared principally (but by no means exclusively) towards Java development. I've been an Eclipse user for some time, but principally for its ability to mediate nicely with my version control server (SubVersion), and the pleasantness of using the graphical editing tools. I was aware, though, of the huge potential it has for rapid application development, and finally got around to putting some time aside to investigate.

The product of my attempts have been documented here, on the DSpace wiki:

HOWTO Integrate DSpace with Eclipse and Tomcat

Along the way I found all sorts of goodies, like the Database Explorer tools, that allow me to execute SQL directly from files open in the editor onto my running database, and a variety of graphical and semi-graphical tools for editing my files. The full power of the source code analysis for a properly set-up project is staggering, as are the refactoring tools.

The real kicker, though, the feature that makes this effort all worthwhile is that I can now run DSpace (or any other web application) from within Eclipse. It looks after controlling Tomcat, and ties in the Tomcat debugger to Eclipse, so that (and this is the really cool bit) I can set points in my application source for execution to halt while I examine the state of the machine. So, I load a web page, which invokes code within which I have set "breakpoints", and Eclipse immediately takes over, opens up a debugging environment, and allows me to step through the code, line by line if I like, examining the in-memory objects all the way. Awesome. In the original sense of the word.

I've seen other people use similar functionality (for example in Visual Studio), so I'm glad I've replicated it in Eclipse. Of course, now I'll discover that everyone has been doing this for years, and I'm the last to catch on. But if I'm not the last to catch on, or at least to figure out how to get DSpace working in this environment (non-trivial) then I strongly encourage you to give this a go.

Google Summer of Code Go-Ahead

At the start of last week Google announced the students who had been funded under this year's Summer of Code project. DSpace is pleased to be able to say that it has 5 students being funded to do development for the platform over the next 3 to 4 months. The details of the projects are as follows:


DSpace Content Integrity Service
- Student: Jiahui Wang
- Mentor: Jim Rutherford
- Mentor Backup: Scott Phillips


Portable citations: moving citations between DSpace and bibliographic software managers
- Student: Jodi Schneider
- Mentor: Stuart Lewis
- Mentor Backups: Claudia Jurgen, Christophe Dupriez


DSpace Versioning
- Student: Robert Graham
- Mentor: Robert Tansley
- Mentor Backups: Mark Diggory + Scott Phillips


Statistics
- Student: Federico Paparoni
- Mentor: Richard Jones
- Mentor Backup: Stuart Lewis


Visualization Artifacts for Manakin/DSpace
- Student: Brian Eoff
- Mentor: Scott Phillips
- Mentor Backup: Mark Diggory

An overview of DSpace involvement is available here:

http://code.google.com/soc/dspace/about.html

We are currently involved in the preliminary discussions with the students over their work, and design and development will start in earnest during May. Watch this space for updates.

OAI-5 Presentations

Presentations from OAI-5 are now available online, as well as videos of some of the presentations:

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=5710

Configurable Browse System released

Well, things have been a little quiet on here, what with my extended easter break. But now I'm back in the office and getting on top of things again. There's a few things to update on, which I will be doing over the next couple of days. The most exciting thing today is that I have finally finished the release candidate code for the new Browse system for DSpace. If you are a DSpace user, please check it out at:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1702233&group_id=19984&atid=319984

I have been using the core of this for some time, so it is should be stable. Your feedback would be welcome.

Crawling like Ants

During experiments yesterday I discovered that running java processes from inside the Ant build tool can have unforseen performance issues. I had written an Ant task to build the browse indices for my DSpace system. This involves producing 9 separete indices for around 80,000 records, and is not a rapid process at the best of times. Previous executions of this code have yielded index rates of approximately 10 - 15 items per second, which I was pretty happy with. Running it in Ant, though, dropped my performance right down to a low of 1 item every 2 seconds! After this had run for several hours I killed it, and tried it again directly from the command line; up came the performance again to usual standard.

So, what is going on? Here are some details:

- while indexing in Ant, the box was under almost no load - no physical memory shortages, disk io bottlenecks, etc.

- I toyed with the idea that memory allocation to the JVM was the problem, but I've seen the indexer run with different memory allocations, and it has so far never caused a speed problem (just OutOfMemory errors)

Answers on a postcard. Or in a comment.

Repository 66 and the Google Map Adventure

Tim Brody from the University of Southamptom has just blogged some URLs to add repository locations to Google Earth.

I thought it would be worth adding that the University of Aberystwyth's repository guru Stuart Lewis has been running Repository66 for a couple of months now, with the same premis (except you don't have to download Google Earth to use it).

Google Summer of Code

DSpace is pleased to announce that it has been accepted as a mentoring organisation in Google's Summer of Code 2007.

http://code.google.com/soc/dspace/about.html

The following DSpace developers are officially mentoring for the period:

Robert Tansley (Google)
Jim Rutherford (HP)
Richard Jones (Imperial College)
Stuart Lewis (University of Aberystwyth)
Claudia Jürgen (Universität Dortmund)
Scott Phillips (Texas A&M University)

I am very excited about it, and we have the workings of plenty of ideas for the developments that can be undertaken.