Hey all, I think we have to start working on this again. I instigated a lot of
From: "Aidan Delaney" <Minds-disaster@redbrick.dcu.ie> this
so heres my few ideas for the moment. NerveCenter is: a place where non-Minds members can read about us/clubs&socs and the latest news. And Minds members... ahem.
Synapse is: a secure web frontend(ssl) for minds members to use so they can read/write mail/news. BTW, we have a page on redbrick about this... http://redbrick.dcu.ie/~minds/nerv/ ... only problem is one of their sysadmins moved our dir over to a new disk and changed all the permissions! ;) I'll set it back later on today.
IMHO (in my humble opinion) Synapse should also contain a terminal in order to further our educational goals (show people how to use UNIX), and provide for all forms of life (lowly 1st yr anthropology ---> Cian). Well, he's going back to being one *AGAIN*, so there must be *something* good about it! ;)
We need some data. 1) What are we doing (what services to provide) I'll go an talk about this later on this evening... got to work.
2) Usability studies (Jackob Nielsen (personally I don't like him),
GNOME
usability studies...) Can you explain what you mean by this?
3) How to provide them (php,perl,postgreSQL -- J2ee/Apache/Jakarta)
I'd say a mix of PHP, Perl and PostgreSQL for the Nervecenter; running on Apache.. with servlets for Synapse functions. I would elaborate now, but work pushes that to later! ;)
Personally I think I know what we're doing & It should be beered up at our beer. Sorry, spoken about at beer our beer beer beer. Can't beer out beer. You not Homer. You must die!
I am in favour of using a KDE2 type interface as it may help any new Linux users (KDE2 is the default WM on RH, SuSE and Mandrake). I also like the idea of J2ee on Jakarta. I know people say it is slow, but it is the future. Erm.. implementing a KDE2 type interface to help any new Linux users? What? We're mostly Windows people here.
# readable code
I'll talk later about this.
# maintainable code
Necessary, stems directly from readability.
# extensible functionality
Mmh.. fluff.
# portable code (java)
Why is this necessary? Portable to where? Windows?
# security (j2ee authentication model)
and AFAIK (as far as I know) apache 2.0 is an app server( for those of you who don't know, the whole web model seems to be changing from pushing HTML to
web services, thus WSDL, XML, etc...) Er, Aidan; the Apache Software Foundation advise people NOT to use Apache 2 for important servers at this time in it's development. And, as it's running on Minds/TIE, the decision over what web server will be run won't be left up to the Nervecenter project group, but to the Minds / TIE groups. And I don't
providing think John, Phil or Bart will want to use it... what with server uptime being a priority, especially for TIE.
I've done a lot of web stuff for Ericsson, Sepro, and a few other companies, so I'm not talking through my arse. However this is only my opinion and I'd like people to think about this.
Could Dave & Cian (particulary, not exclusively) comment on this, as I knoe Dave is a php hacker & Cian is the Chosen one. First *I've* heard of it! ;)
Lastly, If we are going to use a db package could we use MySql as I don't think we'll ever need transactions and MySql is easier. We are going to need to use transactions. Have you forgotten what we talked about?
For those who don't know, transactions are a pseudo-synchronous method of updating your database. The O'Reilly book "MySQL and mSQL" explains it better than I can: "Transactions enable you to group multiple SQL statements together as one unit of work. By grouping statements together, you can be certain that no one else will see a partially changed database. You also know that if one of the statements fail, the entire unit of work fails." Gotta work, David Barrett