The ALICE Membership system

Abstract

With over 2000 active members from 174 institutes over 41 countries in the world, the ALICE experiment is one of the 4 large experiments at CERN. With such numerous interactions, the experiment management needs a way to record members’ participation history and their current status, such as employment, institutes, appointments, clusters and funding agencies, as well as to automatically generate the physics paper author list considering the experiment publication policy. The ALICE Glance Membership system handles all these needs and has been active for more than 8 years, helping the collaboration to organize their data, efficiently. In this document, we describe the new ALICE Glance Membership system, which is the result of breaking the monolithic code of the old version into two well-defined environments. The first is a REST API written in Object-Oriented PHP using the Slim framework to expose the data and Doctrine to access and manage an ORACLE database together with a Domain Driven Design approach to simplify the code architecture, dividing it in smaller self-contained contexts. The second is an HTTP Client written in the Vue.js framework to create a responsive and clean user interface. We will show how these changes have minimised maintenance efforts, lessened new features’ development time, reduced technical depths, facilitated newcomers onboarding and also simplified the user experience.