Technology fails – at least sometimes. This is particularly true for a modern distributed research infrastructure, such as DARIAH-DE. For the operation of this infrastructure, we have implemented a monitoring solution with Icinga. This enables us to be informed about problems and react quickly.

Central Logging Service for Distributed Applications With the release of our great new presentation layer for the Goettingen Digitization Centre we faced new problems. The Application consists of many different separate services (and servers). For example a Symfony frontend application, separate applications to deliver and process IIIF manifests and images.

Well, at least partially self-updating. You still will have to write the sentences and all that… Suppose you are at the beginning of a project and have written some classes.

The continuous integration toolchain has developed a lot during the last years. Our mission, to build and deploy everything completely automatic and reproducable became more and more elegant. But let me take you back into the ancient halls of our workflows. Let’s take a TYPO3 CMS website. We built sites with this PHP-based Content Management System for ages, but let’s skip the dark woods of Subversion.

Twitter for Goettingen Digitisation Centre / Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum Did you know, that with the current relaunch of the GDZ (Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum), we implemented a small bridge to Twitter that tweets out the newly scanned works? This feature was integrated in our Symfony App using the simple endroid/twitter library. Feel free to follow this unofficial account at @just_scanned.

Here is a cheat sheet to XQuery serialization.

Looking for platforms to start prototyping the Atom text editor or its superior platform Electron passed our way at the Research and Development Department recently. For feasibility studies we sometimes test new frameworks and when we can use web technologies to start coding, there is quite a good chance for a seamless connection between data structures, algorithms and the front end.

Symfony console For a rather small task we needed to build a standalone command line app to process and copy some files. Our first approach to that included using the JVM (Java, Kotlin), because it needed to be deployable and runnable without any great hassle. But going a little further we skipped that approach and remembered the great Symfony Console which provides a quite simple interface.

Welcome everyone! This is the place to read about projects, resources and all the things we deal with at our work on digital collections, databases, APIs, tools and esoteric programming languages we prefer to write in. It is not meant for a single subject, but covers all topics we 💖. So I hope you don’t mind if the next post is about one of my adorable cute rabbits.