MicroViews: Appearing In The Wild

It has been a bit of a quieter week on the MicroViews front as I have been helping out on other projects. But I did manage to get a big goal ticked off over the last week. MicroViews has now been applied to the ECS public facing people pages. You can see an example of it in action on Dave Millard’s people page. The library is now working across all of the people pages providing views for all of the EPrint links on the publications pages.

MicroViews is also being pushed through the ECS internal news system in order to encourage adoption of the library on personal user pages. It is hoped that I can use the initial interest generated by doing this to get MicroViews onto the lecture notes pages for ECS. One problem that I will potentially have with getting MicroViews onto the notes pages is that they are within the SSL protocol. Since MicroViews is currently only running over the http protocol and it is only proven to handle requests to http addresses more testing will be required when hosting MicroViews from an http address and making requests to http servers from an https page. If the repository is also an https address then I can’t see that there would be a problem.

A potential solution to this problem would be to create a bridge script. This unfortunately would complicate the installation of MicroViews somewhat but it may end up being a necessary evil. The bridge script would be hosted on the same domain that is including the MicroViews library. So if I were running a server at https://example.com I would install the bridge there. An additional option would then be added to MicroViews that instructs it to append the bridge callback to any requested URL. The bridge would then be a transparent passthrough that crosses the http/https divide. In effect the script would take the EPrints URL, make the request and then just echo the output back to the script. The problem of crossing between http and https then would no longer be a problem as this is a browser enforced security restriction.