Here are a few screenshots to give a taste of what it is like to use our new Django app to manage a set of URI redirections:

Administration Overview:

For any URI-Scheme: Basically, the Django app allows you to control a listing of MIME Media Types, and Rewrite rules.

USGIN URI-Scheme: The same basic structure, but the USGIN-specific app allows you to control a listing of Name Authorities and Resource Types, as described in this post.

Listing of Rewrite Rules: A nice overview of what rewrite rules you have in place, and a mechanism for searching for the one you might need to adjust.

Creation of a Rewrite Rule:

A common problem we run into is the unique identification of resources. This is a very broad statement because it represents a very broad problem. We have identification schemes for all kinds of things: people have names, web pages have URLs, books have ISBN numbers, etc. For the USGIN system to work smoothly, we need an identification scheme for resources that are part of the network. In USGIN we use Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) which follow a specific format. For more information about the format, and for more background, see this post on lab.usgin.org.  

Once we have this identification scheme built, it is important that the URIs can be dereferenced, or in other words that they are resolvable. We would like a user to be able to put the URI of a particular feature into the address bar of their web browser, push enter, and be presented with some sort of representation of their resource of interest. This is the niche that our Django-based redirection engine it trying to fill.

Files: 

Generic URI Redirection (Django App)

Files: 

USGIN-Specific URI Redirection (Django App)

Introduction

I'm relatively new to Django, and maybe to servers in general, but setting up Django is a chore. Or at least figuring out how to set it up is. There is no installer. You have to have a pretty good understanding of how your HTTP server (IIS, Apache, whatever) works before you're going to be able to get anywhere. Then you'll have to know how to set up quite a few ancillary applications (e.g. Python, WSGI, FastCGI, Flup, MySQL, PostgreSQL). The details of which other applications you want to set up depend entirely on the evironment you're building - so that means it is a little different every time - and that means it is pretty hard to write one single "walkthrough" for how you should do it.

What I want to do here is detail my setup, and along the way make some suggestions about what seems to make things easier. So here goes:

Suggestion: Use Ubuntu (Most recent stable version, always.)

I say this because that apt system really makes installations a breeze. I fumbled for a while to try and setup WSGI (a module for Apache) to work on my Windows machine, to no avail. In Ubuntu it is so easy: