BASICS Web Publishing Framework

Overview

BASICS, which stands for Brothers and Sisters in Christ Serving, is a non-profit, cross-denominational Christian ministry based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The BASICS Web Publishing Framework is intended to support the BASICS activities in Milwaukee, to make information resources readily available to workers and beneficiaries, and to network other organizations involved in improving the quality of life in the inner city.

The BASICS Web Publishing Framework will be a three-tier network application involving the following technologies:

Tomcat 3.2.3 server
MySQL 3.23 database server
XML and XSLT framework for generating HTML page layouts
Oracle XSQL Servlet (which is part of the Oracle XML Developer's Kit) for generating XML result sets from database queries
Java for custom application logic

Regular Meeting Times

We regularly meet as a development team on Mondays and Thursdays from 3:45pm to 5:30pm at Heritage Christian School, located at 109th St and Greenfield Ave. We will continue to meet there on a regular basis until the project can be sustained in a more distributed, disconnected fashion. Click here to see the attendance history for all developers.

Setting Up the Development Environment

For the latest instructions on setting up the development environment, click here. These directions have been tested and should work without modification on Windows NT, 2000, and XP. However, on Windows 98, some changes need to be made to the directory names and the setvars.bat script so that the directory names adhere to the DOS 8.3 names limitation.

It should also be possible to set up the development environment on Linux or Mac OS X using the available version of the JDK/JRE. No one has tried this yet, so we don't have instructions with the detailed steps for those platforms yet.

BASICS Forms

The following links are for scanned copies of paper forms used by BASICS. The information represented on these forms will need to be part of our database schema and XML/XSL implementatation. We will also need a small data entry application of some kind that volunteers can use to digitize the data accumulated by BASICS:

Tasks

We will be focusing on the following high-level tasks in the near term:

Longer term, we will encounter more issues, which will be listed here (or in more appropriate places on SourceForge) as we get to them.

Project 1: XML Web Framework

Older Project Documents

Two older documents: a skills assessment which we still use (but is becoming irrelevent) and a project overview which is now outdated.

Questions?

Post a message on the SourceForge forums or email the BASICS project lead (candb_dev_lead) at sourceforge.net. By the way, "candb" stands for Christian Action Network Database, which is the name that this project had historically.