Though there haven’t been many requests for the information in this post, we felt it would be a good idea to keep everyone up to date on the internal direction and progress we are making, much as Jason’s earlier post regarding the Staff Client did. What follows is an overview of where we are with regard to our storage and retrieval of library specific data. We will be focusing on the domain specific stuff, especially bibliographic data in the form of MARC records.
Staff Client
The database and middle layers have been progressing as expected, but we are choosing a new direction with the client half of things. This is only unfortunate in that the user interface is the most visible and graspable part of the system, and it would have been nice to have screenshots and mockups by this time in the project, even if only to solicit feedback from others. However, we are very fortunate in that we are now utilizing a powerful and versatile framework known as XUL (which stands for XML User Interface Language and is pronounced Zool).
Hardware
We’ve had some questions about what kind of hardware we’re developing the software on, so I’ve decided to write an entry about it. As we describe in the FAQ, we’ve decided on Linux on x86 as the target platform, and we’ve built a development cluster accordingly. We have 5 Linux servers of varying configuration: 1 database server, 2 application servers, and 2 load balancer/firewall servers: