Hi everyone, Here is a quick update on the software development effort for the Peer to Patent software. In January the software development team spent time looking more closely at various alternatives that have been proposed including Jackrabbit, which is the content management solution used in JBOSS Portal, as well as the TOPAZ framework. The TOPAZ framework (see http://www.plosone.org/home.action) has quite a bit of appeal due to a substantial overlap in requirements and some very interesting tools such as the ability to annotate XML documents. In spite of this there have also been some concerns with the technical complexity of the framework related to use of Mulgara and Fedora. There does not currently appear to be a way to setup this data store as a high availability solution, which is a project requirement. In the latter half of January the team has developed some prototypes using Ruby on Rails for the purpose of testing out technical functions related to tagging objects, searching, as well as threaded discussions. Several key features we require are relatively simple to implement as a first cut using Rails. For this reason we are proceeding to develop a functional prototype with this technology. We are also actively prototyping the application HTML using javascript and the DOJO library. There are a number of features that we want to test out, and we expect the user interaction design to evolve as a result of testing with a functional prototype. We will continue to explore java-based tools for selected problems and in particular for the problem of storing patent application files and user-contributed prior art files such as image files or word processing documents. Some additional technical decisions are documented here: http://tools.dotank.nyls.edu/wiki/index.php/Peer_2_Patent/developer/use_cases_discussion/uc2_setup For those interested in the visual interaction design, we have links to a site map as well as visual mockups here: http://www.communitypatent.org/project_docs/2006/10/site_map_exampl.html (warning the screen design PDF file is quite large) http://www.communitypatent.org/project_docs/2006/11/screen_design_m.html The screen designs themselves are in flux; as we learn more about what is required they will be evolving. Also, we are slowly working through the process of creating detailed designs for each screen that appears in the site map. We are posting updated mockups on about a bi-weekly cycle, so feel free to check these links for updates in a couple weeks. In February we will begin focusing on what technical solution should be used for the graphical visualizations of data that appear in our screen prototypes. We will also explore how this application might interoperate with other applications in the community, and what mashup API functions might be most useful. At this time mashups are not necessarily a requirement but we'd like to consider this with a goal to have a more robust technical design. If there are ideas for mashups that would be valuable, please feel free share them on this mailing list. From a release standpoint, we are targeting to have functional builds of the system for March 1 and April 1. Hopefully a first look will be possible around March 1 timeframe. As always, constructive questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome. Thanks Eric Hestenes Technical Lead NYLS Community Patent Review project eric.hestenes at communitypatent.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/p2patent-developer/attachments/20070126/1b9f1114/attachment.htm
