It was a bit silent here recently - but only in the ALOE blog! Behind the scenes, a lot is happening. This especially concerns the refactoring of the system. We learned several lessons in the last months, and we got some very valuable feedback from inside and outside DFKI. So what are the changes to expect in the next ALOE version?

First of all, ALOE 2.0 will have a new JSP interface which allows URI driven navigation. The implementation is performed according to the J2EE Pattern FrontController in combination with the Action Pattern in order to make the component easy to maintain and simple to extend.

In addition to that, a new architecture of the ALOE Web Service has been implemented which provides the following advantages:

• Improved interface in particular for JAVA clients. For such clients many methods return beans so that a confusion of return parameters can be avoided.
• The business logic is encapulated in a seperate layer in order to enhance the extensibility of the system.
• Encapsulation of the data base access in dedicated classes so that the exchange of the persistance layer will be eased for future scenarios.

Further the new ALOE Web Service stores resources, user-defined metadata sets and metadata about the resources in a MySQL data base. That way fine grained access control to the data which is stored in the system can be guaranteed.