When I met with Mark and Ian from Talis back in January they’d suggested hosting a follow-up meeting later in the year. So yesterday when I went to visit them I was expecting it to be somewhat of a “blast from the past” what with me being an ex Talis customer. But everything was different: new offices, lots of new staff and lots of new ideas.

Ian played host and introduced me to Chris, a lead developer for Talis Aspire who went on to give me a demonstration of the system which I must admit is very impressive. I wasn’t able to reciprocate with an online demo of LORLS as we haven’t yet knocked any holes in our institutional firewall to allow external access to our development server. However, I was able to show Chris and Ian some screenshots.

One thing I noted at our first meeting was the similarities between our two systems. This became even more evident after I showed Chris a simplified E-R model of our data design as he went on the say that apart from the entities relating to access control it was basically the same as theirs. Hopefully this means that “great minds think alike” and we’re both on the right track.

After the meeting I met up briefly with Richard Wallis (one of the few faces I recognise from the old days) who went on to explain about his Juice Project. This is in effect a piece of middleware that can sit between your website and various external resources. The benefit being that instead of everyone writing their own method to access the resource you can instead use someone else’s code that already does it. This sounds like a great idea and one I think we should consider using for LORLS.