Technical Description

Overview and History

This Attachment Theory Website was originally launched about seven years ago.  It grew out of a Visual Basic program I wrote when an undergraduate student of Psychology (the Atkins Reference Management System) that was a combined reference management system and notes repository.  Early on I decided to make these notes available and wrote a module that created a series of inter-linked HTML files and these were posted on the web, originally as The Attachment Theory Website and later as the ATWS Database.  The site you are looking at now is a further development of this, where I have taken the core reference management system and placed it on the web as a generic Academic Content Management System.  In fact three sites are currently being hosted within the content management system but only one (this) is live at the moment.  The other two (one for statistics and one as my a replacement for my current home pages) should go live sometime before the end of the year but for now I am focussing on bringing this site up to date.

Server Side

This site is hosted on a Windows 2003 server running IIS.  Incoming requests are managed via a bespoke ASP request handling component that uses URL rewriting to convert from the user-friendly URL's you see in your browser to a series of encoded instructions that are fed to the page generator.  Server-side scripting is in ASP.NET using VB and C# components that extract, format and serve the site contents.  Below these is a layer of VB and C# classes that manage the 'business logic' of the reference management system.  These use ADO and SQL queries to communicate with an Access database that is very little changed from the original database I set up all those years ago.

Client Side

Script is delivered as cross-browser compatible XHTML (transitional) with javascript providing occasional DHTML niceties.  I am also using Microsoft's "codename ATLAS" system for AJAX (asynchronous communication using javascript and XHTML) communications with the server to power my remote site editing pages.  The editor is based on a client-side (javascript) 'wysiwyg' editor customised to allow easy inclusion of my own javascript powered custom tags.  These provide me with the capacity to edit site content, upload new materials and references and generally manage the entire site remotely.

Client-side code presentation has been validated against the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Development

The development platform is a laptop PC running Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and the ASP.NET Development Server.  Most (in fact all) of the bespoke software components are written by me and most (in fact all) of the above technical terms are registered trademarks or other legally protected acronyms or terms owned by a rather big company based in Redmond, Washington state (the one run by that Bill whats-his-name bloke).