A very long man day

For lunch we had a delicious Pizza funghi from Ask.

impossible is nothing...

It's been a frustrating week attempting to download this D6 image. Every attempt seems to fail with a corrupt zip file. It was looking like we'd have to rename our application "5MD - Download". After trying with over 8 ftp clients, others in the team also tried and failed, however in the EDN forums people were having success, so we couldn't give up. Finally I tried attacking my 8 different downloads with 4 different compression packages and found a combination the actually unzipped the package.

So from staring at a near withdrawal from the content I'm pleased to say we're back on track, all be it, not quite where were we planning to be at this stage, but that's IT for you...

Picnic caused by download problems

Well I was going to be spending all of saturday in the office getting my man-day, or should I say person-day, worth of work completed on our entry. We had hoped to get a vertical slice of google-top working to use as a prototype to build on as we explore the new DFS API. However, Rob had problems with the download, and coincidentally it happened to be a cracking day. What bad luck :) - I had a little picnic on the lawn and read up on the DFS dev guide.

When software architects hear plans for web-service based implementations, they often start complaining about the overheads and lack of efficiency. I notice that the dev manual tries to make it clear right from the beginning that the emphasis is on SOA, not specifically web services. From the quick browse I have had so far, it looks like Documentum provide a full set of stub type classes to invoke the services, and they are clever enough that the underlying protocol can be switched from SOAP to client runtime for a local deployment without changing any consumer code. Also, they look like they have made an effort to minimise traffic with the design of their 'coarse-grained' interface. For instance, in one call we can update all the properties and relationships of a whole group of objects. It looks like we construct DataObjects, specify the new values for only the properties that need updating, and pass them all through in one go... it can't get more efficient than that! I guess we will find out soon if it is as easy as it looks.