Alexis's Blog on TReCX

Yesterday we (Adam and I) attended the 'Show & Tell' meeting in Manchester. The meeting was held at the University of Manchester Conference Centre, which is very close to Manchester Piccaddilly train station. We stayed there the previous night and went out to a local Thai restaurant with Alex and Juliette from the JoinIn project (in fact it was the former's birthday that day!).

The day was intended for the various project groups to demonstrate actual working pieces of software. I almost had a last minute 'mare with our stuff not working. I had 4 tracking stores all running on the same laptop OK, but as I had not bothered connecting to the wireless network it was baulking on startup as it could not import the XML file which contains the xml:lang attribute required by our schema. As it was, this is unnecessary anyway, because by default we have XML validation turned off. Anyway, once I'd finally tracked it down to this, it was just a case of commenting out a few lines and re-deploying the newly modified war file. I've now modified the code so that the validation mechanics are only instantiated if validation is turned on (sensible enough!). However, clearly a more comprehensive solution would be to use catalogs some how.

Anyway, I think our own presentation didn't go too badly. I thought it was a shame that our fellow members of the Bodington brethen at Leeds, the SOCKET project were unable to demonstrate their stuff properly as their main development server was down. Overall, I would have to say that I think that the R2Q2 project impressed me the most (and not just because of the nifty flash animation of an R2D2 robot they had in their presentation!).