In a previous post, I went through my thought process for choosing Aptana/RadRails (on the Eclipse platform) as my Ruby on Rails(RoR) IDE. Well, that didn’t last long.

I recently began designing a generalized front-end to Fedora, with the goal of allowing domain experts to easily input, share and re-use digital content while at the same time allowing information specialists to design the metadata framework used for those digital objects. In other words, the system can be thought of as a digital asset management system for faculty, facilitated by librarians.

Within the system, digital objects are complex, composed of a set of metadata and one or more files of various types. A digital object can belong to more than one collection, and a basic set of Dublic Core (DC) metadata can be assumed for every digital object, along with one or more metadata profiles, or templates that are defined by collection.

The metadata profiles will be designed by librarians and implemented with the help of developers informed by the needs of the faculty populating the collection. These metadata profiles will be designed to accommodate an arbitrary number of fields of arbitrary types, so the structure of any collection’s metadata can’t be known at (system) design time, as specifying this structure is a function of the system itself. Designing the data model for this aspect of the system began as an interesting puzzle that as I unraveled it, started to look like an increasingly elaborate version of the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model…

It seems in the last few weeks, there has been an especially hot debate around Ruby on Rails (RoR) and Grails. The debate on both sides has been respectful, and most importantly, a lot of good ideas are being exchanged.