Transforming the e-Concordiensis

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Transforming the e-Concordiensis
Senior Project Computer Science 2005
Edward MaasAdvisor Prof. Cass

• 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/)

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.
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