The Fascinator 2

The team found itself with a little bit of breathing space this past week or so and we focussed on developing The Fascinator Desktop. There was a fair bit of whiteboard time with Peter early on and the coding began. Call it agile or whatever, a team sharing design issues whilst developing components just seems to get their stuff together better than a highly pre-spec'd system.

So, what did we achieve? Well:

• Linda got Watcher up and running - even despite a moving goal.


• Ron and Oliver worked on creating a storage API to allow us to test against Fedora or CouchDB


• Bron and I created components to get the Watcher queue and extract metadata and full text via Aperture.


• Linda created a transformation API to convert files into a variety of renditions.

This gives us a tool chain where we:

1. Watch your system for file changes


2. Extract the metadata and fulltext from the file


3. Transform your various file types to renditions such as html and pdf


4. Store the data in a repository

From this point, we can lay The Fascinator search engine over the top and give you a faceted search of your files. It's not all there yet - we need to finish off some of the storage work and get it all tied together - but here's hoping that the end of the week brings version 0.1 of The Fascinator Desktop!

My admission from the week: I must integrate unit tests into my development approach.