eDev@lse

Future development work - LSE for You

We start a new round of development work in November.   Our Project Board has made our first priority the replacement of the ‘back end’ of LSE for You.  The infrastructure behind LSE for You is a few years old now and has recently been showing signs of strain.  We hope to put a more robust framework in place, one which will allow us to seperate the framework, which assembles the pages in LSE for You, from the content, which is delivered by the framework.  This should allow us to refresh the content without having to reboot the framework, something which we hate doing but have to do at the moment whenever an application needs to be changed.  There will be a number of other advantages such as having a more transparent, monitorable service and support for more sorts of content.

What will this mean to our customers?   We hope that you will get a faster website with hardly any downtime.   We hope to minimise the visual impact, i.e we want the website to still be recognisable to our current users:  we think that re-working the navigation and page layout is another project.  However we hope to take the opportunity to consider how the work which Website Services have been doing in their Review of the LSE website might be incorporated into LSE for You, for example we will be looking to see whether the templates which they have produced for their project might fit with LSE for You.