edna.edu.au

About the me.edu.au blogging system

So I'm a technical architect at education.au, with responsibilities which include the me.edu.au service. Over the past few months we've been working hard to integrate a blogging service into the professional networking site which we had previously delivered.

The core me.edu.au website is a custom Java web application, built using a fairly standard technology stack (Spring, Tomcat, ROME, Postgresql ,Solr, CAS).

In this latest release we have integrated the open source Java Roller weblogging system using SiteMesh. This has allowed us to almost completely avoid modifying the core Roller code (although we did have to alter the user interface layer in the JSPs). This will hopefully let us take future upgrades to Roller without needing to do too much customization. Most of the customisation we've done to the core Roller code base we've sent back to the project as a set of patches, which will hopefully be integrated over time.

One nice customization we did was to integrate tag suggestions from communities of interests. This means that this particular post will show up in the me-edu-au community, because I tagged it me-edu-au.

Because Roller is a separate web application, we have been able to deploy it in a separate Java Virtual Machine. This allows us to increase the reliability of the site as a whole, because we can partition upgrades and do downtime for each application separately.

We have also integrated the blogs into the me.edu.au search using Solr. For example, a search for "blog" now will return everyone who has created a blog within the system, and can be facted by blogs, blog posts and comments, as well as all the standard facets which previously worked (communities, people, etc).

Thanks to the entire team who worked to build this. I'm sure I'll miss more than one person, but Ben (who did most of the coding), Kate, Jo, Jane, Kerry, Mark D, Mark TF, Michael J, and Graham have all made significant contributions at various times.

Tags: technology me-edu-au programming
Posted at 09:25AM May 29, 2008 by Nick Lothian  |  Comments[2]