Ginkgo Projects
This commission presented a tough technical challenge: how to implement a
relatively sophisticated website which required a minimum of technical expertise
to maintain and expand?
The site presents projects in the domain of public art and institutional commissions, so supporting and maintaining high production values was a key feature.
The client was (understandably) not at all interested in acquiring the extensive technical knowledge which would ordinarily be needed to keep such a reasonably sophisticated website operational, yet he wanted to be able to update the website content and also add to it.
Eclipse proved itself a satisfactory vehicle for this technology transfer. Its Java base gives adequate platform-independence and an Ant plugin allows standard ant build files to be executed. The right set of Java libraries brings in support for all the required ant operations on the filesystem, on the images and on the XSL source files. Some limited familiarity with basic Docbook elements is the only technical requirement.
The second challenge was setting things up so that the client could simply add a folder
at the right point, copy XML from a sibling area, adapt it to the new project and add a number of
prepared images.
The build process had to detect the presence of added content, extend the website structure appopriately, integrate the new content into the extended structure and propagate any necessary changes - such as augmenting navigation menus to reflect the added content.
Again, Eclipse comes to the rescue. A Jython plugin is available for Eclipse and, with the relevant jar file available, the more complicated processing of filesystem resources written in Python, perfectly adequate for this type of task.