Meeting Notes for 27 July

Present: Joel, Liz, Edit, Sudha, Marge

Special appearance by Edit today, who's graciously agreed to help us figure out a few things about the code structure and the problems we've been having with it!

JDBC

The e-Lab code uses the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API to interface with Postgres. The version of the JDBC driver is matched to that of Postgres; the connector version must be greater than or equal to the Postgres version. One problem Sudha was having was that the driver version of the SVN "test" branch was 9.2, while the Postgres version on the iMac was 9.4.

VDS

Removing VDS will require us to rewrite all of the tools used to access the database. We would also have to eliminate Swift, which is key to running all of the Cosmic Ray analyses (Swift is what allows us to have jobs running in the background).

We do have the VDS source code. It's in the vds/ folder in the standard quarkcat/ directory structure.

Eclipse

Sudha will try to re-configure the iMac to use Eclipse the way Edit had set up. This allows for local deployment and testing of the website without having to commit and checkout from the main SVN repository for each change. It might be necessary to downgrade Java 8 to Java 7 in order to get Eclipse to work. As a side note, Edit recommends moving from SVN to Git, which no one objects to.

e-Lab technology

Using JSP and Java for the e-Lab code is outdated architecture in a certain sense, but it's solid and well-known, so we should probably stick with it. Tom develops in Javascript and Bootstrap, which is easy to embed into JSP. If we were to create a new e-Lab structure in a different set of languages, Edit estimates it would take a team of ~10 developers about a year.

-- Main.JoelG - 2016-08-03

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