Ying's Literature Review

(File Last Modified Fri, Apr 11, 2003.)

• A few words about this site
• The system

A few words about this site

This site contains pages of my literature review. It is an attempt to facilitate the communication between my superviser Dr.Tim Menzies and me. For a super busy human being who lives on internet like Dr.Menzies , this makes it (sadly) soooo easy to track how much (or how little) I'm reading. Although I hate the times when I stayed up late in the night, managing to post out the reviews, I must admit that it did leave me something that would otherwise slide away silently.

These pages are automatically generated using a Perl script: absolute.pl with some customization. Dr. Tim Menzies wrote the script to translate his graduate course materials -- lots of cool cleanish prolog stuff -- into webpages. As a software engineering educator, Dr. Menzies is always trying to present live software rather than dry theories to his classes. He uses that site to teach graduate classes and his students submit their projects in the same format.

If you cannot- in the long run- tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless. --Erwin Schroedinger

I was browsing his site the other day and found this method quite handy. To familiarize myself to the whole system I spent 3 days re-did my literature reviews. My experience showed that, without any knowledge of Perl(or prolog), one can:

• Find enough information about how the system works.
• Download most files needed to make your own (believe me, you don't need to get the entire directory tree).
• Have enough options to customize it.
• Keept and use it as a handy tool to rapidly build self-contained websites.

The system

The system works as follows:

• Every file should be documented in Perl POD format (plain old documentation) described at http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/pod/perlpod.html .
• The Perl script absolute.pl invokes pod2html (utility comes with Perl package) and converts each pod document into a webpage (html format).
• It also takes certain configuration files to generate internal hyperlinks among the individual webpages so as to make a complete, self-contained site rather than a bunch of unrelated pages.
• It allows you to define your own file types and style sheets so your site gets a rich yet uniform looking.

The system did a good job in showing raw code with demos (sample input and output). This is the original intention for presenting software in class. However I didn't utilize it at all. I just love that it is so convenient to organize a series of documents, each of which is suitable to be presented in one webpage. Plus, the POD format is absolutely the simplest markup language I've ever seen.

For more details, have a look at:

• The Perl translation code: absolute.pl
• The configuration file: options.lib
• And most importantly, the absolute prolog site at: http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~menzies/pl/