The DevCSI logo appeared all over the venue before the launch and generated some real interest as a result of which I’m happy to say that I have already had brief preliminary discussions with several people about supporting or arranging specific events. A quick taster of the sorts of things people approached me about:

• a barcamp event being organised by the
• List8D developers from the University of Kent
• a suggestion from Gobe Hobona of Nottingham University to convene a workshop around BPEL and tools to support its development and use – this suggestion came out of discussion following a presentation from Ian Ibbotson of Knowledge Integration
• a possibility of working with Andy Cobley of Dundee University who is doing some inspiring things with ‘hackdays’ for students there
• an event with a focus on female developers (there is all kinds of cultural male-bias in the developer community generally – in the HE sector we should, frankly, raise our game in this respect). We have a suggestion of a very interesting sounding and appropriate venue in Manchester
• working with OSS Watch on a developer event around Wookie

Now, these are just preliminary expressions of interest, but I’m already quite confident that we will be involved in some, if not all of these. We will begin to firm up on these next week, and I’ll be blogging about progress with this here, so if any of these (admittedly minimal) descriptions sound in any way interesting, leave a comment here or drop me an email at p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk.

In addition to this, we have committed to running a Developer Happiness Days event in the first quarter of next year – we’re aiming for some time in February. You can read about the first of these which was run in February of this year.

We’re still feeling our way into this – but the energy and enthusiasm for developer community events and collaboration was obviously apparent at the event today – and this bodes very well for this project.

In the course of working with the Scholarly Works Application Profile at UKOLN it has become apparent that it is often difficult for repository managers to understand how SWAP might work for them, as they have nothing concrete to work with. Because of this, it is difficult to ‘sell’ the idea of SWAP to this important stakeholder-group and it has meant that SWAP is still largely untested in terms of usability. For this reason we have decided to investigate a concrete implementation of SWAP using a demonstrator that can be used to allow users to play with entering real world data to populate a SWAP profile.

I have recently been using Django to make quick prototypes and in this case I realised it would be the perfect tool to create the demonstrator with minimum fuss. Django has many great features including my favourite implementation of a template engine and object relational mapper (ORM) and an automagic administration interface. In this case we are interested in the latter two. The data model is defined in Python code and the database generated from these models. In most cases there is no need to write any SQL with the Django model API providing the functionality to alter objects. Having used several ORM’s in the past including Hibernate, which admittedly has a lot more to do with greater database support and more features, really appreciate the simplicity. The admin interface comes for free and can be used as is or customised with little effort. It is this admin interface that I am using as a SWAP demonstrator.

The different major elements of SWAP can be represented as objects and hence as a database table which in turn appears in the admin interface.

Django admin interface

SWAP Expression

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