Re: [Treebase-devel] harvesting

[Roderic P. <r....@bi...>]

> 
> At some point TreeBASE needs a radical rethink. A nonSQL document store would make life so much easier, as would cleanly separating the data entry stuff from the data storage and output.
> 
> I tend to agree except that I don't see how TreeBASE3.0 is going to get built by all volunteers. Will you actively contribute?

What, instead of sit on the sidelines and complain? Where's the fun in that? ;)

I don't think being built by volunteers is the problem, almost the reverse. TreeBASE 2 has just about the worst set of technologies if you want people to get involved. There's no way I'd touch PostgreSQL, Tomcat, Java, Hibernate, etc. with a 10 foot barge pole. The cost of participating is just too high.

But if it's re-engineered using, say, HTML, SVG, Javascript, a document store, and a little server-side scripting, then things become much more tractable. A search engine like Elastic Search would add some nice features as well.

I've not submitted anything to TreeBASE 2 so I can't comment much on that, but again I'm sure this could engineered using the above tools quite simply (and no passwords! let people use Google/Facebook/Twitter/Mendeley to log in).

I guess I'd want a focus on users, particularly people wanting to get data out of TreeBASE. The current interface metaphor is unusable.

In some ways I'd be less worried about all this if I could get the data out of TreeBASE 2 easily so I could build a local version with the kind of interface features I want. So, the argument that people who complain about the interface are free to build their own using the API has some merit,  but collapses because it's so hard to get all the data (and annotations) out.

Regards

Rod 



---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
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