2.3 Interface Design

Initially, we were going to develop the SDD as a web-based program in Visual Basic dot NET (VB.NET) Unfortunately, because server systems running UNIX operating system, such as the SFU servers, do not support the Microsoft BASIC language, we were informed that VB.NET was not an option (Stoodley, J. 2003). This left us with the option of learning and using a programming language no one in our group knew, or using the only “canned” software solution available to us: ESRI’s Metadata Explorer, a component of ArcIMS. Time constraints forced us to go with Metadata Explorer. Because our interface is a modified versus of ESRI Metadata Explorer, the work involved in this part of the project was not difficult; rather, just riddled with errors mainly due to bugs in the software, which are discussed in detail in the problems section. This work mainly involved adding and removing metadata elements from the details page and the browse page. Due to time constraints and workloads, the main page of the SDD was left with the standard Metadata Explorer theme intact.

Modifying these pages required altering the code of the Java Server Page files that are associated with Metadata Explorer. Acquiring the ability to perform this work required an introductory tutorial to programming Java, as well, a primer on Hyper-text Mark-up Language (HTML) source-code editing. The edits to the code involved declaring the XML path statements for the elements, then adding new code to the JSP file to ensure that the newly added elements were displayed on the details and browse pages (note: this part of the work was the trouble spot). See the sample from a Java Server Page file.