Our project focuses on enabling self-service discovery and scheduling of community center resources via a web-based calendar and scheduling system, working with the St. Francis Neighborhood Center. The St. Francis Community Center, located in the Reservoir Hill community, is one of the oldest in Baltimore City. The center currently has a number of programs and activities for the community to enroll in and schedule. As the center looks to expand, manually scheduling activities has become a burden. As such, our project aims to ease this burden, by moving scheduling online.
Evan Hsia, Computer Science '19
Sofya Freyman, Computer Science '19
Danielle Currey, Computer Science '21
In order to accomplish this, we used the open source framework Lutece, developed by a team in Paris,
France. Lutece is a Java framework that at its core gives users a basic front office and back office
web application. To extend the application, Lutece introduces the use of plugins, which allow future
users and developers to add various functionalities to the site without having to touch code. Many
plugins already exist for various purposes. For example, there is an appointment plugin which provides
a calendar-based sign up for activities and events that the back office can track.
Lutece also allows developers to create their own plugins in case the existing ones lack the necessary
functionality. We used this feature to create a general enrollment form for programs that required
enrollment as opposed to scheduling. This is where the main coding takes place.
To run Lutece, we make use of Apache Tomcat and a MySQL database. Lutece currently powers many of
the web applications in the city of Paris. As another part of our project, we wanted to evaluate
Lutece and provide a basis for the city of Baltimore, and perhaps further, to use it.
(currently under development)