Plaza Status Report

August 24, 2006

Jennifer Oxelson and Tom Yoksas

 

Forums

At the request of various community members, Unidata as investigated and purchased the Jive Forums package. Jive was installed on our development server early summer 2006 for testing. Jive provides/satisfies almost all of the requested wish-list items and requirements, including:

• Ability to be integrated with existing Unidata mailing lists such as ldm-users, etc. (See mailing list section below for more details.)
• Provide RSS feeds for community members who wish to receive mailing list and/or forum announcements via that venue.
• Contains access control rules to allow selected members of Unidata's community to administer/moderate their own forums from remote locations.
• Fully integrated with Unidata's web site including Single Sign-On features.
• Display's user's latest posts.
• Allows users the ability to 'watch' a specific forum or thread.
• Ability to display public-knowledge Unidata support questions in a read-only forum-venue for those users who do not wish to use the Mailman mailing list archives.

Complete list requirements (must login to see this - contains sensitive information about our system architecture)

Jive will be put into production on Unidata's public web server late-Aug/early-Sept 2006. Unidata staff and the IDV Steering Committee have offered to 'kick the tires' and test the forums. When they are finished testing, the forums will be available to the rest of the Unidata community.

Installation/testing of NEXRAD-ITR project MapServer

Unidata is collaborating with the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and NCDC to make Level II NEXRAD metadata available on-line for browsing via a MapServer. MapServer is an Open Source development environment for building spatially-enabled internet applications. to render spatial data (maps, images, and vector data) for the web.

Unidata has installed a MapServer on our development server for testing:

• PHP wrapper script (provided by the University of Iowa) have been installed to allow modification of a template map file based upon the type of map requested. The scripts and their accompanying files were altered to work in the Unidata environment.
• The PHP wrapper scripts have been tested against a modified version of Apache's suEXEC to give the scripts secure read/write access to our file system.
• We examined running PHP both as a CGI script and Apache module concurrently on our server. (The MapServer PHP wrapper scripts require PHP to run as CGI scripts. The PHP code running on the Unidata web site are interpreted by PHP as an Apache module.) While common practice to configure/build PHP as either one or the other, it is uncommon, complex, and not-standard to run both concurrently on the same server.

Based on the preliminary testing, it was decided the MapServer (when put into production) should be hosted on a separate server from our main web site (due to the numerous configuration differences between suEXEC and PHP). Next steps include:

• Hardware will be purchased for the MapServer with consideration for performance.
• The MapServer, PHP, and accompanying files will be installed and run under the domain of mapserver.unidata.ucar.edu.
• Alternate CGI-wrappers (e.g., CGIWrap) will be explored to see if we can achieve the same result without having to modify Apache suEXEC code.
• FastCGI will also be investigated as a way to enhance performance of the MapServer installation.
• Level II NEXRAD metadata distributed via the LDM will be integrated into the MapServer.

 

Web Page Design Update

Unidata's top-level web pages were redesigned to be 'less scroll-ie' and offer a more visually appealing look. Example images were added to Unidata's visualization software package pages, and the data page to provide quick examples of display and format capabilities.

 

Mailing List Migration

Mailman has been selected to take the place of currently used majordomo as Unidata's new mailing list manager. Mailman was installed on our development server for testing. Mailman provides/satisfies almost all of the requested wish-list items and requirements, including:

• Ability to be integrated with our forum software (See forums section above for more details.)
• Provide sub-classing mechanism to integrate with our own user database stores.
• Ability to interact with Mailman via a web interface or email for handling subscription changes, etc.
• Can display mailing list archives by thread, author, and/or date.
• Ingest old majordomo mailing list archive content.
• Ability to display user's current mailing list subscriptions.

Complete list requirements (must login to see this - contains sensitive information about our system architecture)

Mailman will be put into production and Unidata's mailing lists migrated starting in Sept 2006.

 

Other Projects For Fall/Winter 2006

• Integrate eSupport user web interface with our web site.
• Create RSS feed for the Unidata Newsletter.
• Investigate and acquire/install an on-line calendaring system to better display Unidata/community events on our website.
• Evaluate and purchase a Signed Certificate for Unidata's web site (and possible software authoring?).
• Evaluate and acquire/install a web-based mail package for Unidata's use (current UCAR-wide systems not working well for us).
• Investigate the use of an on-line newsletter program for Jo and Emily to use.