Business summary of the solution:

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, one that emphasizes the pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems. This unique scientific enterprise attempts to uncover the mechanisms that underlie the deeper simplicity present in today’s complex world.

Because the growing SFI community demands both historical and current information about research, methods, and intellectual perspectives, an ad-hoc approach to research, data, and content management is no longer efficient or appropriate. Therefore SFI has defined a new initiative, the Scientific Information System (SIS), to provide a thorough and systemized approach to capturing and disseminating the scientific content of SFI. The SIS solution is intended to facilitate continued ongoing intellectual engagement of the various constituencies that co-evolved with the Institute, and to ensure the Institute continues to impact the way the world thinks about science.

Technical Summary:

The SFI project integrated and utilized several open source projects to meet the customers requirements. The system is composed of three different applications: a content management system (CMS), a calendaring and scheduling system and a standalone web application hosting forms.

The open source version of Alfresco was implemented and customized as the CMS application of the project. The customizations included creating customized components, custom database and LDAP connectors, tight integration with the calendaring and forms web applications, and integrations with WebDAV and Marklogic. The user interface was customized using JSF, JSP, JSTL and CSS. However, the Marklogic integration was done using proprietary software.

Bedework, an open source calender system, was integrated and customized to meet the customers calendaring and scheduling requirements. The customization includes integrating with Alfresco and enhancing the user interface to fit the customers requirements.

A standalone web application was developed to meet the customers requirements for a standalone web app used to provide online forms (surveys, registration forms, etc…). The web application integrated all open source projects to accomplish its goal of providing a secure, reliable and highly reliable web application to provide online forms. The web application integrated Spring, Chiba/XForms, Hibernate, LDAP, MySQL, Acegi Security, and WebDAV. The user interface was built using CSS, JSP, JSTL and Sitemesh (as a web page layout and decoration framework).

Tech Stack:

Content Management Technologies

  • Alfresco
  • Chiba/Xforms

Web Technologies

  • Tomcat
  • Spring Framework
  • Acegi Security
  • Bedework
  • WebDAV
  • Hibernate
  • Sitemesh

XML Technologies

  • MarkLogic XML Database
  • XML/XSLT

Other Technologies

  • Java
  • Javascript
  • Ant
  • JUnit
  • MySQL Database

Deployment Platforms

  • Windows Server 2003
  • Linux – Red Hat Enterprise 4