Building the backend of a web application

Modern astronomy has entered into a new era, where the interesting source positions are not known precisely at the time of the observation. Because of that, astronomers either need new instruments, very expensive, or need to adapt their current instruments and collaborate. Such a collaboration is a difficult task because each telescope is unique, and coordinating them is challenging. This is the purpose of the ICARE software: help astronomers to coordinate observations.

A very simple version of ICARE has been built in 2019, but needs a lot of improvement: the front end is full of HTML errors and is compatible only with chromium based browsers, and the back end has been coded without any specifications! A complete re-writing is ongoing since 2020, but has been slowed down by the COVID. It is now time to make the code efficient and usable.

Your task will be to help on this huge effort of re-coding the software. The back end is made in PHP and is object oriented; there are also several Python scripts interacting with the program on demand. The front end is pure HTML 5.0 with CSS. You will have to perform several tasks:

• Software architect: some parts of the back end are not yet coded as object, you will need to correct this and to create the corresponding objects
• Back end coding: code the missing objects needed by the project according to the documentation and the project specifications
• Front end coding: exploit the new objects created to correct the current code, and make it compatible with any current browser
• Expansions: depending on the time spent on the code, it may be possible to add several functions using the Virtual Observatory protocols

For more details, do not hesitate to contact Pr. Bruce Gendre

Client

IP Exploitation Model

Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering The University of Western Australia Last modified: 04 June 2021 Modified By: Michael Wise