Pure Widget

Pure Widget is a PHP/Jquery application designed exclusively for university staff at Edinburgh University. This tool allows staff members to easily discover researchers at Edinburgh University and create dynamic feeds showcasing their highlighted publications and research activities and accompanied by customizable features that cater to the needs of their users. These curated feeds can be seamlessly embedded within the university's websites, significantly enhancing the visibility of the university's esteemed research community.

Initially, the Pure Widget retrieved data from a conventional MySQL database , which posed an issue as the data was duplicated from the Pure API which also provided this data to the same staff profiles for the university researchers.

To avoid data duplication and to take advantage of the new Pure Aggregator API which was being developed at the time, the Pure Widget had to undergo a transformation, moving from a database-driven application to one powered by a dynamic REST API.

Migration

The migration from the existing database to the REST API required collaborating with key stakeholders, documenting and re-developing essential API endpoints that were required by both the staff profile and the current website feeds and ensuring that the data structures still stayed the same. Features such as pagination and filtering had to be implemented for performance and to maintain original functionality, as well as new API endpoints to display the time of the last update.

The REST API was seamlessly integrated into the Pure Widget application and rigorously tested to identify and address any potential issues. This ensured that the new version of Pure Widget met the highest standards of reliability and responsiveness.