Transforming the e-Concordiensis

1. How it works: Existing Infrastructure Current Weekly Process Entity Relationship Diagram Layout Implementation Hibernate Value Objects private Integer Id; public Integer getId() { return this.Id; } public void setId(Integer Id) { this.Id = Id; } AssignPhoto Form Custom Layout Tag: StoryTag.java Struts at work – CheckImages.jsp Critical Forms Senior Project – Computer Science – 2005 Transforming the e-Concordiensis Edward MaasAdvisor: Prof. Cass Motivation There is little dispute that one of the primary goals of the press is to convey information. Traditionally, this was done by printing it in the form of newspapers and magazines. Yet over time, technology, such as the internet, has made it easier and quicker for people to get printed information from their favorite sources. Today, most publications offer an electronic edition, but not all of these e-editions are created equally. Some are rather complicated for their staff to create while others are painful to read. My senior capstone design project addresses both of these potential problems through the creation of a custom package designed for school newspapers, specifically the Union College Concordiensis. Technology Used Open Source JAVA Tools: • Model-View-Controller for the Web • Struts (http://struts.apache.org/ ) • Object / Relational Persistence and Query Service • Hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org/ ) Image Manipulation • Image Conversion (TIFF-to-PNG) • Tiff2png tool (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/apps/tiff2png.html) • Image Scaling • JMagick(http://www.yeo.id.au/jmagick/) Handwritten HTML with PDF Files Current process that the Concordiensis Editors follow each week to create the newspaper! New version will allow each editor to create his or her electronic edition individually. Requests are made to the application by people surfing the site. These requests are passed directly to the model portion of struts. The model then contacts the controller to decide the appropriate action to take with the given request. For example, if the user is filling out a form and misses a required field, the controller will redirect the user back to the page he or she has just worked on to correct the mistake. At step 3, the controller may contact the database via a layer of persistent objects as part of the package Hibernate. In doing this, the user does not need to execute SQL commands, but rather can execute queries via a Hibernate Query Language. Rather than returning fields, Hibernate returns lists of “value objects”. Finally, at step 4, the controller passes data to the view which is then reassembled in step 5 using additional presentation layer techniques, like merging additional jsp files for header and footer. Next Steps and Future Work Start product beta testing with Concordiensis Editors Deploy Database and Application on VU Performance Test under actual traffic! Integrate Feeds from College News Wire