AHA! progress report August 29, 2001.

transparent adaptive functionality for web servers

Personnel

The NLnet AHA project has started on July 1, 2001, when one of the two appointed junior researchers, Natash Stash, commenced work at the TU/e.
The second junior researcher, Olga Proskura, will commence work in the beginning of September, 2001, when passport and visa issues will be settled.

Apart from personnel employed by TU/e and funded by NLnet some students will also contribute to the project:
Jurgen van Westreenen, a 4th year computer science student from TU/e, will be an intern for three months, starting September 1, 2001.
At least one masters student from the University of Antwerp will also be working on AHA for their thesis project, during the academic year 2001-2002: Koen Verheyen.

Activities and results

On July 2, 2001, a metting was organized with the staff members of the Database and Hypermedia group, the NLnet project researcher and one student, to brainstorm about the project goals and a research and development plan.

The three main project activities up to now have been:

1. Setting up a source code control system. Using CVS the source code for AHA can now be shared among all people who do development on the software. The CVS tree resides on the IS server. Every developer has a local copy and can run the AHA server on a local PC.
2. The first project goal that has been realized is the possibility for anonymous login. This will first be used for the IShype information system that provides students with information on the procedure for internships and thesis projects. This information system will be available through anonymous login while still exhibiting its adaptive behaviour.
3. The currently ongoing development is creating the possibility for using AHA with documents from external sources. This implies three sub-parts:
   1. Making AHA able to retrieve documents from an external source (through URLs) in addition to from the local file system.
   2. Changing the behaviour of AHA to no longer automatically generate HTML headers and footers to allow importing documents that already have their own headers and footers
   3. Adding an input filter to convert HTML input files to the XML format that AHA reads. (Currently AHA has a batch Perl script to do this.)