I am proud to announce the release of J!Research 1.1 Alpha 1, the first testing release towards the second major release of the Research Management Joomla solution. This new version includes:

Support for CSE and Chicago (using author-date system) citation styles.

Correction of multiple minor defects.

Enhanced user interface.

Support for cooperations, financiers and facilities which are very common for research projects.

New entry in freshmeat which is waiting for approval.

Downloads, here. Issue reports, there.

I am proud to announce the release of J!Research 1.0 Stable. Yes... 1.0 Stable. Thanks to users community, J!Research is ready for a 1.0 version which includes:

Multiple bug fixes reported by community of users.

German and Spanish translations available.

Bibutils support for x86_64 platforms.

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New project entry in joomlacode.org

Special thanks to Florian Prinz and René Serradeil for their collaboration and interest in the project and of course, Nereyda Valentin-Macias, the other brain behind this project.

See you on 1.1 release, which I suspect is coming soon. Downloads, here. Issue reports, there.

The Spanish translation of J!Research was completed this weekend by Luis. With the completion of this translation we are seeking community support in continuing this process and making J!Research available in every language that Joomla!™ supports. Know another language and want to help? Please contact us and/or consider joining the project on Joomlacode.org.

We Thank You for your support in advance!

J!Research is going on. I am proud to announce the beta 1 version, which means the start of a stabilization process towards J!Research 1.0. It includes:

• IEEE citation style (I enjoyed developing it)
• Complete frontend views
• Correction of several minor bugs

Pending:

• Spanish translation which will be announced for beta 2. I am not able to define a date for next releases, as this depends on community responsiveness at detecting and reporting bugs. I will continue testing J!Research and correcting bugs, but as you know, developers are not good at finding them.
• Meeting with Neri, to discuss requirements for J!Research 1.1

I cannot complain of community feedback. I have received several suggestions and minor bug reports which have really contributed to J!Research progress. Thanks a lot.

See you soon in beta 2.

Alpha 3 is ready and brings to us several news:

New name: JResearch is now J!Research. This is thanks suggestions of people in Ecuador who pointed, the previous name would suggest a relation with Java Technology. This change included a new logo, courtesy of Neri.

New website: Thanks to Neri's help, we could get http://joomla-research.com. From now, I will post J!Research news in the website which includes a J!Research demo installation. Great!!!

Entry in Joomla Extensions Directory. I am waiting for administration approval.

More frontend views: As you surely knew, J!Research frontend is not complete. This release includes:

• Staff, publications and research areas views including integration with Jxtended libraries from which I borrowed captcha implementation for comments.
• Internal column in publications admin list.
• Correction of other minor issues.

Pending:

• Bug in editors-xtd plugin when searching publications in IE 7. Now I am working on it.
• Spanish translation, as J!Research will have its first user in my university.
• Projects and theses views
• Edit profile view for authenticated users.

Downloads here. Thanks for your support during this GSoC 2008. We will see you in Beta 1.

JResearch is going ahead. Today August 27th, I am proud to announce the release of a second alpha of the software with several minor issues detected (some non-reported in the tracker) and corrected during Alpha 1 stage. Unfortunately, there is a known issue in the editors-xtd citation plugin when searching publications in Internet Explorer 7. I promise, Alpha 3 will include its correction.

As I told Neri, I made a terrible mistake in my last blog: I announced Alpha 1 but without a link for downloading it and reporting issues in this site. I elaborated a zipped package which resides in KOKOA website for my university community. Well, you can download JResearch Alpha 2 directly here or doing a checkout from the repository:

svn checkout http://joomlacode.org/svn/gsoc2008/JResearch/tags/alpha2

A note about the zip provided. As JResearch includes some compiled components, I will distribute several versions of the software for different hardware and os platforms. The binaries provided run in Windows and Linux x86 platforms. Binaries for x86_64 platforms are coming soon.

If you want to download the last revision of the repository with the latest added functionalities (obviously not tested), you should checkout in http://joomlacode.org/svn/gsoc2008/JResearch/trunk/

And for reporting issues, here is the page. I will really really appreciate your help in this aspect. I also promise to list in detail the list of bugs fixed during this stage.

Many people in my country has suggested me to change the name of the application, as JResearch might suggest a relation with Java technology. Maybe J!Research or JoomResearch. Again, I will discuss it with Neri.

Finally, we are analyzing several options for the hosting of the project's website. I hope to make a decision this Thursday.

What is pending:

• Project documentation, as the time to upload the code in Google's repository is really close (URGENT).
• Publications frontend (I have started with RSS generation). Goods news related to frontend: Staff public pages are ready to be tested (including how to refere them from a menu item) but they are not included in Alpha 2. If you want to try them, please checkout the trunk.
• Bug in IE 7 :-(
• Set project website.
• My motivation: to have at least one beta version (so no more functionalities accepted for this version) by September 19th.
• Compile Bibutils for x86_64 platforms.
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Thanks and see you soon in Alpha 3.

This summer has been full of activity; mentoring, migrating, and kayaking. By far the most rewarding of activities has been my involvement in the Google Summer of Code program and volunteering for the Joomla! project. When Joomla! first announced its need for mentors this summer, I jumped at the opportunity to help and support the project as well learn more about the code and its inner workings. Since, I was and am unable to participate as a student, then mentor I had to be.

Although, I am quite knowledgeable in many areas of technology and have worked with PHP, Javascript, XML, and other bits of code. I would never call myself a coder by trade, I am a web site designer/developer and integrator, before this a systems administrator. Need less to say I was quite intimidated and unsure of how I would be able to support my student through the process. So, my immediate thought was to focus on the application design. One of my first statements to Luis was, "there is a right and wrong way to build an application." The idea was to produce a solid application based on the MVC design pattern and strictly adhering to the guidelines provided by Joomla! in developing apps for 1.5. Why? So, that any developer may understand the code upon view and be able to extend the application. In my view a well written application is a driving force for extension and adoption.

I am pleased to see that my approach worked as a new mentor and as a student. Luis' application is shaping up quite well and I am proud to be a small part of the process. I am also proud to have worked with Luis and learned as much from him as I provided guidance. This mentoring student enjoyed GSoC 08 and looks forward to another. I highly recommend that anyone interested in being a part of this program dive right in! I did and had a blast!

Much Thanks to Wilco Jansen for giving me the opportunity to participate and the other mentors for their support and community. And Thank you to all the students who participated this summer and created some great code for Joomla!. Awesome job lady and gentlemen!

It has been a wonderful summer of code. Being part of Joomla community and GSoC 2008 has undoubtedly been the best experience I have ever lived during those nearly 5 years of academic life. Today August 18th, I am proud to announce the release of JResearch Alpha 1, a testing version which includes component backend, support for exporting/importing bibliographical references in MODS, Bibtex and RIS formats and plugin for automatic inline citation.

As can be easily inferred, releasing an Alpha version means there is still pending work, but that JResearch is ready to be tested by community, the core of open source process. That process began last week, when thanks to Neri, I could identify several defects, some of then solved today. Alpha 1 has surely more defects I hope to start correcting from now thanks to all you.

I have decided to dedicate Alpha 1 to my mentor. She has been a great support during this process: good advice, always available when I needed help, nice conversation (even when talking about other topics). I hope to see her personally once and continue receiving her mentoring beyond GSoC 2008, because JResearch will continue. This week, I will start a campaign in my university to propose its use in research departments, including the one where I work now. I started today with KOKOA (http://www.kokoa.espol.edu.ec) community. I hope to receive their feedback those days. Neri (as always) has kindly offered her help. You are super!!!

I also found a minor bug in Joomla code which I hope to report a soon as possible (surely tomorrow). That issues avoids to cancel a form submission even if the user has implemented onSubmit event in a form. The patch is really simple.

My summary of pending activities cannot be absent:

• Report detected issue.
• Define a logo for JResearch. It is important!! My announcement in KOKOA website looks dull without a logo.
• Correct pending issues reported in tracker (including the ones reported during this week). Everything towards Alpha 2 which is programmed for next Monday.
• Start frontend publications page.

Comments are welcome

JResearch is nearing its first release Alpha 1.0 on August 15th. Features day one will include the complete backend.

• Importing of publications in bibtex, MODS, and RIS formats.
• Exporting of Publications in above formats. (RDF to be included however, we are still trying to determine which ontologies to include. I am leaning Luis towards the Dublin Core as it relates to publication metadata, but would like some direction in this area or the opinion of Researchers and/or Professors).
• Staff, Research Area, Publication, Project, Theses, and Citation Management
• APA and MLA Citation Styles
• 5 Plugins: Load Cited Records, Persistent Cited Records, Search, Auto Citation, Auto Biblio Generation
• JXtended libraries dependency: Integration of Forms Engine and Captcha/Recaptcha Libraries

Track bugs and the progress of JResearch online and please feel free to download the pre-alpha application from svn. As always community feedback is welcomed and encouraged.

MLA citation style had to wait because some pending issues could finally be solved thanks to Neri, Ian and Anthony. Their help was like an aspirin for the "clean session" problem. As stated in previous blogs, I have not been able to find a way of cleaning session cited records once the user leaves the editor page (additionally, I wanted to store those records in database, so they were retrievable whenever trying to edit the article). I tried several methods without success until I knew through my last meeting that Joomla 1.5.4 included events onAfterSaveContent and onBeforeSaveContent. Yes, exactly what I needed. The lesson: to read the announcement page of every new Joomla version. With that information, I finally solved the "clean session" problem through two plugins: one implementing onAfterSaveContent event for storing cited records in database and the other one attached to onAfterRouteEvent to load into the session the records when editing an article. The number of lines of code required will surely make you laugh. One thing is missing: to automate its installation when installing the component as I did for the other 3 plugins, but that is a piece of cake.

Issue associated to getting component configuration parameters in backend was solved too. In that case the solution was a single line of code. Again, thanks to Neri, Ian and Anthony.

APA citation style is ready. As I told Neri, it needs a lot of testing because the amount of rules is large considering I only implemented those related to the format of cites and bibliography section. APA citation style also define rules for the document presentation in general, which are beyond the scope of JResearch (at least for the soonest release).

Parsers have been tested a little more and thanks to Neri's feedback, I identified the faced problem was related to file permissions. I should have considered that as I am a full-time GNU/Linux user. Installation routine was modified so bibutils executables has the right permissions now. However, it needs to be tested in a Windows machine because, honestly, I do not know the implications of using chmod function (PHP does not mention anything about problems in Windows). There was another error related to imported files size. It was also corrected (apparently).

Exporters hierachy is partially implemented. Bibtex, MODS and RIS output are ready (not tested yet). RSS will not be implemented according the published design because I want to take advantage of Joomla's RSS support. RDF is my new dilema so I need your help here. As you know, RDF is a general format for representing knowledge. I have decided to include RDF support in JResearch using XML flavour for serialization. The problem is that there nearly 100 ontologies (defined vocabularies for a set of entities) for representing publications knowledge . It is simple: I do not know which to use. I know some people is working with RDF in GSoC 2008, so I would appreciate a lot their help in that part. I will continue surfing the net those days to tidy up my ideas and find a solution. I suspect my job colleagues will also be helpful as they work in Artificial Intelligence.

Finally, my priorities:

•  Update the repository (URGENT)
• Automate the installation of plugins for persistent cited records.
• MLA citation style
• Integrate implemented classes to include exporter functionality (at least for implemented formats)
• Solve the RDF dilemma.
• JResearch backend ready by August 4th.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!!