we have a logo

inspired by andrews login wait prompt, we have a panther springing from the ledge of 5 man days, over the application, it's that old rule poking it's ulgy head again, developers and graphics should never be mixed...

Feeling the pressure

We've broken up the work as best we can (although 2 developers somehow both ended up recreating the properties component!). My first piece of work has been to create a simple login dialog. To get started I downloaded an eclipse version called europa, and that has been driving me insane. When time is a factor, any little problem builds up pressure, and there is something wrong with the package explorer and cvs plugin in europa.. sometimes things just don't seem to be showing up. (sorry, I have to tell someone about it).
Anyway, other than that everything went well, using GWT is far more like programming a desktop client than a web app; control is on the client, and server calls are made to pull data when needed. For instance, there doesn't seem to be a 'page' concept, instead you add and remove panels as needed.

some progress at last

Finally up and running after the frustrations of the download process and the setup of the image, which needed some config change to expose the web services and webapp to the network. Thanks to a big effort by Alex on Saturday we finally have a system we can develop on.

On the brighter side we've had more time to read up on the GWT and the DFS both of which look very cool, like a couple of sharp looking sports cars entering the test track, will they live up to the hype or blow a gasket on the first lap.

Managed to get a simple tree working with the GWT and implementing the search service to populate it with proper docbase folders didn't seem to hard. Very cool, ajax with no javascript. Now for the trickier stuff, getting actual content across the GWT and into the repository and back again. Time for some more reading...

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.

Download failed

Was hoping to get away with a good start today but the 6Gb D6 vmware image failed last night after 3.5Gb. Kicked it off again but it needs 4-5 more hours. I guess we'll have to start by looking at the front end and the GWT.