Newton Project
From digitalHPS
The Newton Project
The Newton Catalogue is served using MySQL and it is chiefly updated whenever we publish additional texts. In these instances, the updating SQL is generated from key metadata extracted from the XML file by various perl scripts. On rare occasions, one of the editors might need to update some of the extended (non-transcript derived) metadata and this would be done manually phpMyAdmin as a web UI.
We actually have both a development and a live server setup and all changes are first tested on dev before being pushed live.
Newton Project Server Details: 2 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Xserve with two 1000baseT Ethernet connections and 1GB of RAM running OS X Server (v10.4.11). Key installed software for the project includes: Apache 2.2.4, PHP Version 5.2.0, MySQL 5.0.27, Apache Tomcat 5.5.20, Apache Cocoon 2.1.10, eXist 1.1.1.
The situation is similar for Livingstone Online (UCL). Again, we are running on a fairly typical *AMP setup (in this case the server is running Solaris 10, Apache 1.3.34, MySQL 5.0.19 , PHP 5.2.1). Catalogue updates are, again, triggered by dynamically generated SQL or - much more rarely - entered manually using phpMyAdmin. The chief difference between Livingstone and Newton, however, is that the Livingstone server lacks Tomcat and Cocoon (although this will hopefully be rectified in the coming year). We consequently lack the ability to dynamically transform our XML texts into HTML. In the absence of this facility, we have had to use a scheduled build script that transforms all our texts into HTML using Saxon 6.5.5 (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/) and then automatically uploads them to the server. We also lack a university-controlled development environment, so all development is tested on a web instance installed on my main working machine before being pushed live.
