+Project Description+

CollectionSpace is a collaboration that brings together a variety of cultural and academic institutions with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information. This report includes an update on the project team's activities for June and July. The next update will be released Friday, August 7th.

Updates are emailed to the [Announcements|Mailing Lists] list and posted to the project [wiki|Roadmaps & Updates] the first Friday of every month.

All planned CollectionSpace services are documented in the [services repository|Service Description Repository]. In addition, the services developers have outlined a [schema extension model|Services Architecture]that will facilitate institution-specific and domain-specific customizations of the services offered by CollectionSpace.

The services team created a series of presentations for the all-hands meeting in June that give an excellent overview of their methodology. These presentations are available on the project [wiki|Services Layer - Overview and Directions - June 2009].

CollectionSpace uses the [Fluid Infusion|http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Infusion+Framework] framework as the basis for its user interface (UI) architecture. Built for creating applications that are highly usable and accessible, Infusion provides a set of APIs for creating loosely coupled models and views using a declarative and event-driven style. Infusion is built on top of jQuery, and embraces unobtrusive, functional techniques that promote less code and greater flexibility.

Each page in CollectionSpace is organized as a hierarchy of components, managed through a controller. The user interface is bound to the application layer through a UI Specification (or UI Spec), which provides the basis for generating the component tree. In the 0.1 Release, only the central data entry component is active.

The user interface development team put together a presentation for the June all-hands meeting that includes a very clear walkthrough of the user interface architecture, and its integration with the application layer. This presentation is available on the project [wiki|UI Layer - Overview and Directions - June 2009].

The application layer serves as the conduit between the user interface and services layers, and as the chief engine for configuration. It takes the form of a number of domain-neutral "engines" which either encapsulate application-level services directly, or delegates them to the core services layer after appropriate translation. For example, the Forms and Grids engine provides datafeeds in two directions (via JSON) to manage the representation of forms, differences in forms, and the handling of their contents. The Event engine determines when and how application-level events (e.g. "this object was accessioned") turn into service-level events (e.g. "create photograph accession event"), and vice versa.

The code for the 0.1 Release is free and publicly available. Visit the project wiki for [installation and configuration instructions|Hello World Installation and Configuration], and deployment documentation for the [services provider|How To Deploy a Release of the CollectionSpace Service Provider].