I’m writing this email to provide some background and clarification about the ALA occurrence search (front-end) web application.

There are actually 2 separate versions of this web app. The old Spring MVC version which was developed over 3 years ago and a new Grails version which was developed this year. The demo site and ansible script both use the new Grails version. For those of you who have only used the ansible script, you can probably stop reading now. But for those people/groups who attended the workshop in Costa Rica last year, please read on…

The new biocache-hubs Grails webapp is a direct replacement for the old hubs-wepabb Spring MVC webapp. As a number of our other front-end systems were already done in Grails, it made sense for us to migrate the hubs-webapp to Grails, as it meant there was a single layout file (and associated CSS files) required for all these apps. The webapp was written with most of the core functionality being in a Grails plugin, with a light weight client Grails app using the plugin and providing the skinning, as well as overriding any components that need customisation (i18n, views, custom URLs, etc).

We aim to have the code up on Github soon (you can find it on the ALA Google code repo until then - see biocache-hubs and generic-hub). Once up on Github, it will be easier for people to clone/fork our code and provide pull requests back to us, etc. We will make an announcement about the Github code repo, on this list, once we’ve moved the code over.

If any of you have already created custom i18n translations for the old hubs-webapp code, could you please send me either a zip copy via email or the URL to your code repo and I’ll try and include the i18n codes into the GSP pages, etc.