[Reader-list] Fellowship posting #4

[Subramanya Sastry]

Since I am going to be out of town for 2 weeks, I am posting my report well in
advance.  -Subbu.

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       News Rack: Automating News Gathering and Classification
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Abstract:
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Several organizations in the social development sector monitor news that is
relevant to their work.  This is a time-consuming and laborious process for
some groups, especially when the news is monitored, marked, cut, and filed
using hard copies of newspapers and magazines.  Prior experience with the
press clippings page on www.narmada.org indicates that some of this work can
be automated.  This simplifies the task of news monitoring and also saves
time.

This project attempts to automate news monitoring, and aims to provide tools
for classifying, filing, and long-term archiving of news.  The project will
deliver a tool that can be installed, and will also provide all the same
services on a website for those who do not want to (or cannot) install the
tool.

Current status of News Rack
---------------------------
Since the last report, I have been working on getting up the web-based user
interface.  In doing this, I have realized that this is an involved process
since the user interface has a number of screens (corresponding to sign in,
registration, user space, searching, browsing, editing, etc.).  I started
this development using Servlets and Webmacro.  Nevertheless, the complexities
of developing forms, validating them, processing requests, interfacing with
the underlying database, requires a fair amount of development.

The problems I have faced in developing the web-based interface for
News Rack seem to be common to many web application developments with
any amount of complexity.  Developing user-interface screens, screen
navigation, flow of control between pages, the forms and their validation,
processing of user requests, interfacing with a database, etc. seem to
be some of the common tasks in these web applications.

Many web applications are developed using the "model-controller-view" (MVC)
design pattern.  In the MVC design pattern, the application is organized
into three separate modules:
(1) the application model with its data representation and business logic,
(2) the view that provide data presentation and user input, and
(3) a controller to dispatch requests and control flow.

I have been advised to consider using the Struts web application development
framework developed by the Apache Jakarta project.  I also have looked at
the Turbine web application development framework a bit.  It appears that
Struts or Turbine will both work well.  However, I have received advice to
go with Struts since it is not as bulky as Turbine.

The Struts web application framework supports the MVC design pattern and
provides a controller component -- the web application developer is freed
from having to develop this.  It also provides facilities to use various
third-party components for the model and the view.  Struts provides strong
support for a JSP-absed view component.  However, JSP has its share of
problems in terms of mixing Java code and HTML-based JSP presentation tags.
This defeats the original purpose of keeping the logic (Java) separate from
presentation (HTML).  Based on reading I have done, it appears that
View components like Velocity/Webmacro might be better choices.

At this time, I am investigating the Struts framework and getting familiar
with it.  I am planning to use the Velocity scripting tool for the
view component (presentation).  For the model, I will either develop a
custom interface for using an underlying flat-file news archival system,
or else I will use the JDBC interface for using the MYSQL database for
news archival.

I do not have much else to report since most of the work has been revolving
with taming the development of the web-based user interface for NewsRack.
Once I get familiarized with the Struts framework, I expect this work to
proceed more rapidly.