VLO 3.0

Note: much of this page can probably be moved into CmdiVirtualLanguageObservatory once 3.0 has been released.

Introduction

With VLO 3.0 a new major version of the VLO is presented with a redesigned and reimplemented front end as its key change with respect to the 2.x versions. It also uses a new major versions of Solr and Wicket, and has a number of importer improvements.

What's new?

For details, see milestone

Libraries and dependencies

• Upgraded Solr server and client (from 3.6.0 to 4.6.0)
• Using the latest major version of Wicket (Wicket 6.x)
• Dropped dependency on Simple framework (replaced with usage with JAX-B)

Front-end

• Addition of a simple search front page
• Redesigned main search interface with more prominent search results and expandable facets
• Redesigned record page
• Improved record navigation
• Improved interaction experience through increased usage of AJAX with non-javascript fallback functionality

Importer

• ...

Documents

• ​Work plan
• ​VLO 2.x analysis

Planning

For details, see milestone

• March 2014: alpha (deployed at ​http://catalog-clarin.esc.rzg.mpg.de/vlo/)
• April 2014: beta
• May 2014: release candidate/stable

Technical notes

Deployment/configuration

Upgrade instructions are included in the UPGRADE file. Some configuration parameters have been added or have changed since 2.18.

VLO is deployed to catalog.clarin.eu for beta and production. There are three tomcat instances running:

• tomcat-vlo1: production web-app, publicly accessible through ​http://catalog.clarin.eu/vlo/
• tomcat-vlo1-solr: production Solr instance, locally accessible through ​http://catalog.clarin.eu:8077/solr/vlo
• tomcat-vlo2: beta web-app, publicly accessible through ​http://catalog.clarin.eu/vlobeta/

The application bundles, which includes a Solr instance app, the importer, the web app and configuration are deployed to directories under /lat/webapps/vlo, which also has symlinks for both the current production and current beta directories. These symlinks are used in the tomcat configuration so that this does not need any change when updating the version of the VLO.

Front-end development

Architecture

• Wicket + Spring
• Spring wiring through eu.clarin.cmdi.vlo.config.VloSpringConfig?
  • Bootstrapped through filter in web.xml and applicationContext.xml in WEB-INF
  • Beans are defined here and can be injected into wicket components and other wicket beans
  • For a tutorial/introduction, see ​http://hwellmann.blogspot.nl/2011/02/building-web-applicaton-with-wicket.html
  • Unit test may inject a custom (overridden) spring configuration

Configuration

VloConfig is POJO

• Factories for different ways of creating config
• Context parameters read via ServletVloConfigFactory?
• Ignored and technical fields are configured through VloConfig?.xml

Localisation

Using Wicket i8n support, see ​Wicket Guide.

• Field names in fieldNames.properties