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Coding bounty: Social news dissemination package for OpenACS
Storyboard
A central
application service for developing web
application is managing and disseminating news information. OpenACS
already delivers a variety of news managing applications, however, most
of them are heavily outdated, unmaintained, or lack important features
(see References). Besides, they do not well integrate with newer
concepts of community-based applications, i.e.
social software systems, with communities being formed ad hoc or in a situational manner. Examples for these kinds of
networked dissemination platforms are Diggs (http://diggs.com/),
reedit (http://reddit.com/new/),
and Newsvine (http://newsvine.com/). Their shared characteristic is
that aggregation of news follows community expressions (votes, polls,
...). The dissemination of news information needs to be generic and
support multiple channels of dissemination, i.e. ordinary mark-up, feed
generation and syndication (RSS, ATOM, ...) etc. Rich interaction
models for various roles of users must be supported.
Tasks/ Deliverables
- Requirements gathering:
Review and evaluate
the existing news managment support in OpenACS and .LRN, i.e. review
existing applications packages. Study their set of features and
prioritise requirements. In addition, study the "social news" platforms
given above and review the "social news aggregation" techniques. Some
conceptual readings are given below.
- Requirements elicitation:
Draft some user stories and capture them in UML Use Case diagrams. They may guide your upcoming design decisions.
- Modelling:
By
means of UML for Web Engineering (UWE) sketch your design from all
three viewpoints supported: content, presentation, and navigation view.
Select the appropriate diagram types for each viewpoint.
- Design:
Review
existing application services and application packages whether you may
re-use and integrate their functionality into your application package.
Note that your package should be entirely developed in XOTcl and by
framework infrastructure provided by the xotcl-core package. XOWiki is
certainly an interested starting point for your re-use endeavour.
However, its feature set might be to complex to achieve your
prototypical goals.
- Documentation: Finally, once
your prototype is sufficiently realised, you are required to deliver
(a) a user/ administration documentation and (b) a developer-centered
documentation. This steps serves the refinement of your modelling
phase. Use the modelling artifacts in your documentation, especially
the developer-centred one.
References
