The Anatomy of the Compendium Odonata
    The purpose of this document is to describe the inner workings of the Compendium Odonata to prospective employers. Since the compendium is made of many third-party components that are constantly being updated, version numbers will remain absent from this document. I will happily provide the current ones on request. I will also refrain from providing links to components as their respective locations are also likely to change. I CAN refer you to the www.gnu.org home page, which appears to be a stable domain and contains links to many of the components contained herein.

    The compendium is a website built around an Apache web server and a MySQL database. It currently resides on an Intel based Pentium II running Red Hat LINUX (shown above). Retrieval of information from the database is accomplished by the use of the servlet, QueryOdonataDBServlet. QueryOdonataDBServlet runs within the Tomcat servlet container and communicates with Apache via the mod_jk connector. The servlet is able to access the database using the JDBC API connector. All this is illustrated in the below block diagram.

    The Compendium Odonata uses a model similar (if not identical) to that being used in e-commerce/e-business today. The "main" html page contains a frame that is dynamically generated within the JAVA servlet. Its contents are the result of a scan performed of all "enabled" entries within the database. Adding additional items to that frame is simply a matter updating the database. Successive requests for that page will reveal the latest item. Clicking an item within this frame will bring up its datasheet. The datasheet is a simple HTML template file that is populated by the JAVA servlet based on the clicked item. This model allows a great deal of flexibility in modifying the datasheet in the future. Since every possible item utilizes the same datasheet template, there's no need to make changes to n number of datasheets should a format change be necessary.