Welcome to roll call analysis and display project

This wiki contains information about our roll call analysis and display project. The goal of this project is to provide academics, journalists, and the public, a powerful way to understand the voting records of legislators. The project is written in Python using the cherryPy application server, Cheetah templating system, and Postgres database.

The plan is to develop a modular application which allows new features to be added easily and which is easy to maintain. The application is not specific to any particular legislature allowing it to be quickly adapted to new settings.

See contact info for TheTeam (and add yourself to the team).

The subversion repository can be checked out from http://adric.sscnet.ucla.edu/svn/rcproject.

How to use this site

If you are helping out with the project, thank you. Look around and see what needs to be done. At the moment the main job is to write detailed use cases. A use case is just a description of a task the system needs to be able to perform including what the user does to initiate the process and what the system does in response to that request. In order not to duplicate effort, if you decide to work on particular use case create "new ticket" with a title like "write use case for browsing votes" and then assign the ticket to yourself. When you are done mark the ticket as closed.

Specifications/Use cases

• UseCases

Design aspects

• DatabaseDesign
• ClassStructure

Key components

• cherryPy http://www.cherrypy.org/
• postgres http://www.postgresql.org/
• python http://www.python.org/

A few fun things to try

• Ajax
  • eg http://www.ajaxian.com/archives/2005/09/turbogears_pyth.html
  • eg http://subway.python-hosting.com/
• Object-oriented database abstraction
  • eg http://sqlobject.org/
• Integrated testing/test driven development
  • eg http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html

Related projects and model pages

Here are links to pages that do similar things well.

Design considerations

Thoughts on what the pages should LookLike??

• Comply with HTML standards
• Formating with CSS style sheets
• XML/XSL where possible for easier integration with users applications.

Trac Starting Points

• TracGuide -- Built-in Documentation
• The Trac project -- Trac Open Source Project
• Trac FAQ -- Frequently Asked Questions
• TracSupport -- Trac Support

For a complete list of local wiki pages, see TitleIndex.

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