Jonathan Harris » MySQL

Univeristy CMS

Jonathan Harris — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:50:55 +0000

This system was developed for my final year project at the University of Portsmouth for which I received a first. The brief was to build a secure multi-user content management system, that would enable the university’s lecturers to create posts and upload content (much like a blog) to the electronics department intranet site. Posts can be organized with a series of meta data such as post date, category, unit, keywords and author. Each lecturer has a user, which has assigned access rights to create posts for only units that they teach and each user has the ability to administrate multiple units. Each post is assigned to a unit and will only appear on that unit’s page. Each post can also have multiple attachments, which can be PDF documents or PowerPoint slides. Lectures could even upload media files such as MP3 which can be outputted a podcast.

The CMS has a three level user login system. The first user level the technical administrator, who can edit settings and oversee the backend, but not add new content. The two other levels can add content, with a limited number of senior lecturers, being able to edit anyone’s posts. Each level has different rights to access the data stored in the database. Most users will be junior level lecturers.

The content of this CMS is outputted to students on the ECE intranet, which I also developed.

University Intranet

Jonathan Harris — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:27:06 +0000

This website was designed for students to receive updates from lecturers on the units that they are studing. This site is the student facing side of the lecture driven CMS. This web site is designed to replace an already existing site, that is currently not database driven but static html pages. Each unit in the department has it’s own unit page, which acts much like a blog, with a stream of the latest updates. This redesign makes the site more dynamic by linking information together for example the author of a post has a link to their profile page.

Students can keep up today with updates by subscribing to each unit’s RSS feed. Students can even filter down to category level of each post and only subscribe to post of category that they are interesting in, e.g. Lab notes for Unit B356. The system has a mechanism for caching of feeds, as this cuts down the server load because RSS feeds can be resource intensive applications as they perform many queries on the database.

The web interface is rich user experience and follows the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

DIP-SNAP

Jonathan Harris — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:27:52 +0000

DIP-SNAP (DIstributed Portsmouth Social Networking APplication) is a social networking site with the aim to provide a simple way for people to communicate with each other and make new friends. The DIP-SNAP owners wanted the system to consist of two main components, a client and a server. The client is a web application will provide users with a web interface to the social networking site which users will be able to access via their web browsers. The server is the backbone of the system and stores the user profiles and passes information between users. Multiple servers were used which will allow the system to cope with heavy processing load and crashes on individual servers.

The system was written using Java and RMI so that each server could be run on any platform. The Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) system allows an object running in one Java virtual machine to invoke methods on an object running in another Java virtual machine. RMI provides for remote communication between programs written in the Java programming language.Each server communicated with each, keeping different MySQL servers up to date with each other. The system used a system of locks to mean that the data wasn’t overwritten. New servers could be added, easily, with new servers automatically getting a copy of the database installed.

UOP GP Surgery

Jonathan Harris — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:01:33 +0000

This is a database driven surgery system, which stores patient details, appointments and has multi level user system. The system has different levels of access, respectionist, doctor and admin all with different rights and access to patient information. There is also an AJAX based waiting room that updates automatically every 2 second and could be used to be displayed in the waiting room to let patients know when the doctor is ready. There is also a shopping cart like prescription system that auto completes name of selected prescription and has configurable renewal.A large group project with a few other designs where we had to work as a group. As team leader I can to assigned tasked to team member, keep detailed logs and time managed. This was a second year project at university and it scored the highest mark of the year.

Other people on the team include:
Aidan Brown
Simon Weald

Meta Computing

Jonathan Harris — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:05:43 +0000

A first year project from University to show our understanding of PHP scripting and javascripts. It uses a very simple MySQL to store the guides and create sitemaps. It is a extremely easy to use and read technology guide site. The design is something completely new and it a real show case of creativity.