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ROADS Newsletter Software Status Report - Issue 9 - July 1999 |
By Jon Knight and Martin Hamilton, ROADS Software Developers, Loughborough University. <roads-liaison@bristol.ac.uk>
There will be the first of the version 3 releases towards the end of July, and another version 2 release soon incorporating hierarchical browsing and quality based ranking. Bleeding edge hackers can catch the version 3 stuff as it happens by following the v3 WWW pages.
Several of the components of ROADS which are being hived off and made into independent Perl modules in version 3 were already available at the time of writing:
| Name | Derived from | Purpose |
| Auth::Check | ROADS::Auth | General purpose access control module |
| Log::Common | ROADS::ErrorLogging | httpd style access and error logging |
| URI::Filter | cgi-bin/waylay.pl and ROADS::Override | Rewrite URIs, e.g. to info page for obscure protocol schemes |
| URI::Sort | ROADS::PreferredURL | Sort a list of URIs into preference order |
These and the other ROADS related Perl modules developed for version 3 of the software will eventually be posted to CPAN for global distribution, once our choice of names has been cleared with the CPAN folk.
The Perl/Tk editor is available for download from http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/v3/tkroads-editor-latest.tar.gz. This version includes the ability to customise the views being used, as well as designing and altering template outlines using a graphical user interface. The Perl/Tk editor make use of the ROADS API to read and write records and is currently being modified to allow a database search to be used to locate records in addition to reading them straight out of the local file system. It also has an API to allow modular data validation code to be plugged in - it ships with simple spelling checker, date checker, URI checker and thesaurus lookup as well as a "dummy" module that documents the API and may be used as the basis for custom checking modules.
The Perl/Tk editor is intended to be shipped both in Perl source and MS-Windows 95/98/NT binary versions. The latter version can be picked up from http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/v3/tkroads-editor-latest.exe though it should be noted that there are still some issues with the Windows release (the source has been running fine on Linux for some time and most of the Windows problems appear to be related to lookup paths).
Issue 9 July 1999
Maintained by Paul Hollands <paul.hollands@bris.ac.uk> - July 1999
