After several years of university development Project Noja is going Open Source. Therefore I have moved Noja to a new home and refreshed its design and services. The site is now hosted by the Binaervarianz.de community to whom I am very grateful for their support. The old Project Noja website hosted at the Technical University Ilmenau is still accessible here, but is no longer maintained.

Website Design

I designed the new Project.NOJA community site with two general aims: to share information, experience and code and to keep users and developers informed and happy. I tried to make the website as usable and convenient as possible with todays Web technologies, but at the same time to keep it simple and managable.

The site is constructed from diverse open-source building blocks such as Content Management Systems, a software project management system, mailing lists, forums, blogs and a source-code repository (see below). Each block has its own strengths and weaknesses, but is superior to perform its special tasks. Together they supply novel and experienced developers with powerful tools that help getting things done and organized. All interested people are encouraged to provide feedback and contribute by sharing knowledge and experiences.

If you desire an additional feature or if you have suggestions, I would be happy to read your comment.

Familiar Features

We continue using Subversion to manage our source code in a single repository. The old repository at TU Ilmenau is no longer supported. I stripped some deprecated features and split the current sources into multiple self-containing modules to ease compiling and working on separate libraries and sub-projects. You can browse the new repository here and you find information on how to work with the new repository here.

We still handle all documentation with DokuWiki and Doxygen. I decided to split the docu into a user and a developer part to ease browsing for people with a certain need for information. The user part contains sections about the NOJA API, code examples and manuals. The developer part contains guidelines and howtos for repository handling, the build system, as well as coding, test suite and debugging issues.

The NOJA developer mailing list has moved to a new location. We still use GNU Mailman as reliable list manager. The old mailing lists at TU Ilmenau are no longer active, so please subscribe to the new list. To ease subscriptions we integrated the Mailing List management into the Noja website.

New Features

To ease the burdon of managing this website I decided to use a content management system. I chose Drupal as CMS because of its many features, extensions and the large community. I developed a new Drupal Theme to fit the special needs of our website and to give it a unique design. Currently we use the following additional Drupal modules in addition to the default installation: Drupal Mailman Manager, captcha and reCaptcha.

New features at the site are a Developer Blog and a Discussion Forum for users and developers. All registered website members will be able to post forum articles and every NOJA developer will be able to post Blog entries. To prevent SPAM we use the reCAPTCHA Web Service at CMU to generate CAPTCHA challenges (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). All edit forms on this website are protected, not just the user registration form because account registration is not moderated. A spammer thus can easily get an account.

New to the NOJA website is Trac, a light-weight bug tracking and project management system. Besides a subversion browser, Trac features a ticketing system and milestone planning support. I hope this system is accepted and used by our developers.

In addition there is a new download section where people can get source-code packages and binary versions of NOJA modules. We will also offer simulation support packages containing stream trace files, patches and extensions to third-party tools.

Upcoming Features

Where possible, I will integrate Drupal authentication into external services such as DokuWiki, Subversion and Trac. For DokuWiki this seems to be already solved, for Subversion there exists early code. For Trac it may be possible to use the new Drupal OpenID module and the new Trac OpenID Plugin, but both are early beta and may not work together. I will investigate this issue.

The next nifty - or say indispensible - feature is a site-wide search capability, covering the core websites (main pages, forum, blogs) and all external content such as DokuWiki, Doxygen and Trac pages.

Finally, the reCaptachs don't work for text browsers. Although there is an audio capability, we need a different solution here. May be we switch to simple text Captchas.