About WebMVC (Freemarker) UI

WebMVC is currently under development, and is creating a new user interface based on Spring's WebMVC framework. This has the same goals as the JSPUI rewrite project in providing a clean technical implementation with business logic removed from the presentation layer.

Although a number of technologies can be used for the presentation layer, the current implementation focuses on Freemarker - a template based language that restricts the amount of logic that you can place in the presentation layer. In addition, it gives more flexibility as to where those templates can be stored, which gives greater possibilities for future customisation.

It has extensive theme support, and allows different themes to be applied to different areas of a repository.

Development is ongoing: http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/modules/webmvc/trunk/

Issue Tracking: https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DWMVC

Getting Started

Add the webmvc module into a stable release of DSpace.

Checkout the source code.

cd ~/project-webmvc
svn co http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/dspace/tags/dspace-1.7.1/dspace/
svn co http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/modules/webmvc/trunk/ webmvc

Edit ~/project-webmvc/dspace/pom.xml and add an entry for webmvc.

<!--
Builds Overlay Modules for DSpace
-->
<modules>
<module>modules</module>
+ <module>../webmvc</module>
</modules>

Compile everything, and add the war for freemarkerui to Tomcat

cd dspace
mvn package
sudo mkdir /dspace
sudo chown dspace:dspace /dspace
cd target/dspace-1.7.1-build.dir
ant init_configs
ant update
sudo cp ~/project-webmvc/webmvc/freemarkerui-webapp/target/dspace-freemarkerui-webapp-1.7.0-SNAPSHOT.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps
## Edit /dspace/config/dspace.cfg to have your bootstrapping configs (i.e. dbname, password)
/etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

Test it out in your browser

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome http://localhost:8080/dspace-freemarkerui-webapp-1.7.0-SNAPSHOT

Screenshots

Some examples, of what is currently available.

Community and Collection list.

Screenshot of browse results.

Additionally, WebMVC has multiple themes (Mirage and Kubrick), the default theme is Oasis.