TreeTapper code now available

The code for TreeTapper (the website's mostly PHP code) is now available. I'll be continuing to modify it, but please feel free to look it over and suggest (or submit) corrections, esp. regarding security.

Moving code to Google Code

I'm shortly (<1 month) going to be posting TreeTapper's backend code to Google Code hosting (final site at http://code.google.com/p/treetapper/). I'll have all the relevant php files (except the one that has the database login information [I hope]) but not basic images. If anyone has any advice about things to watch out for when posting code of this sort, please let me know [I'm concerned about exposing security vulnerabilities -- don't want to rely on "security through obscurity", but if it helps...].

Google summer of code

For Google Summer of Code, NESCent had 11 project ideas, 31 applicants, and just 5 slots. Paul McMillan, an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, was one of the applicants and proposed working on the WebDot navigation of databases project (though he might end up using GraphViz directly, rather than WebDot). His application was detailed and showed good background knowledge; more impressive were his conversations (over IRC) regarding the problem, where it became evident that he had given it a lot of thought and certainly had the background to do this. This project should help with TreeTapper navigation (looking at coauthor networks, for example) and become an easy-to-use solution for other website developers. Congrats to Paul. 

This was my first year with Google Summer of Code. I was impressed by the quality of the applications NESCent-affiliated projects received and how passionate the students are about them (several whose projects didn't get funding have volunteered to work on them anyway, which is amazing (since they'll have to do something else for money, and  so will have less time)).

Google summer of code

NESCent is a hosting organization for Google Summer of Code; I've proposed a project to make a tool to allow databases to be navigated visually (essentially by combining WebDot (part of GraphViz) with something like sqlt-diagram, but for navigating table entries rather than just looking at the schema). Only one interested student so far; if it's not funded, I'll likely do it myself later for TreeTapper.

Google charts

I've added some Google charts to the front page of the TreeTapper site. I'm using googlechartseasyphpclass v 1.02 to more easily generate the code to call the charts (it involves converting numbers to letters for plotting, for one thing), though it does limit flexibility a bit (but the source code for the PHP script can be modified easily). YUI also has a new charts API, but it requires a very recent version of Flash for people to use (more recent than I had in FireFox) -- Google can simply create a png, which is convenient. The code to make the data to pass to the charts takes a little while to work (dozens of postgres calls): I might just update this daily and have the site call a saved version of the data. The charts I've made allow tracking of how much the database has grown in the previous month as well as breakdowns of references by year.