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The ALPHA Presentation

It's been a long time since I posted anything, but it is not because it has been quiet around here. I will try to do summarize the past two months in a few separate posts.

The last post I did was on finishing the ALPHA for our September deadline. It was a hectic time, and we worked very hard. The goal was to present it to the management of Making Waves the next day (who provide the seed money for the Second Brain project). It didn't go exactly as planned:

I was of course a little unprepared for the presentation since I hadn’t really tried using the system - it was only finished the night before. So it was difficult for me to give a systematic overview of the it and how it works for a user. Coming straight from the morning flight from Poland, I only had 45 min in the office to prepare a demo before the meeting was scheduled.

A second problem was that it was very buggy – with lots of bugs that I hadn’t expected. So when I tried to explain how the user would use the system, and what it would do, it didn’t – I felt kind of stupid.

A third problem was that I had to run the demo on a 1024 resolution due to some problem with the projector and my computer. It didn’t work well on that resolution. There were CSS issues on every page. Some of the content was presented in a totally incomprehensible lay-out. The Management asked me if this was a functionality for the more advanced users;)…

But The Management has seen this kind of things happen before. They can appreciate how it is to work with software development.

A few lessons learned from the ALPHA release:

• Do not finish system scope the day before a presentation meeting – there will be bugs, of course!
• Start testing early – the developers need feedback – it’s part of development.
• Have someone take responsibility for the front end development. It doesn’t take care of itself.
• Plan the presentation ahead, and rehearse how to use the system in advance
• If you don’t think you can finish in time for a presentation – ask to postpone the presentation. It is better to be late than to give a bad presentation.

Combining AJAX, Flash and internetness

One of the first challenges we faced in Second Brain was how to build an application that have all the rich functionality that we needed, but still had the necessary opacity to support the ideal of internet as an open and connected architecture. We didn't want to compromise on functionality, we wanted to forget about the old page paradigm, and we wanted it to have the look and feel of a desktop application, while still taking advantage of the benefits of the internet platform. Quite a challenge for the architects.

The coming RIA wars: A roundup of the Web's new face by ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe gives a great review of all the choices that exist when deciding on rich internet applications:

A host of powerful new methods for rapidly creating compelling browser-based software (aka Rich Internet Applications) have recently come to market, or are rapidly heading there. While the technique getting the most press by far these days is still Ajax, there are a number of new approaches that are intent on dislocating this often finicky and hard to work with -- though very powerful -- browser software model. The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.

Of course, one of the first choices that we considered was to just do everything on the Flash platform, its has always been the first choice for RIA, but it has big trade offs with regards to "internetness". AJAX has some great promises, but it is very difficult, and there are few standardized libraries and development platforms that we could use in our .NET based architecture. We are still waiting for Atlas.

We have a lot of experience with Flash, a lot of experience with .NET, but no experience with AJAX. After a lot of deliberation, our choice was to combine all three into the Second Brain application. But we couldn't do everything from the start. So while we are designing the application for this combined architecture, we are not able to develop it with AJAX functionality. We design for new school development, but develop old school. As we progress into the pBETA stage, we will AJAXify the app. and make it smooth, well flowing without all the page-backs and browser blinking.

I'll explain more on the specifics of the architecture when we are ready to show Second Brain to the world (at least an exclusive selection of that) sometime in November.

Developing on the Web Platform

Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web has a review of companies that use web-services as part of their platform/backbone.They list six building blocks of the Web Computing Platform and give an extensive review of companies who offer the components to 3rd parties, like f.x. Amazon S3, and the customer fronting services that use them, like f.x. SmugMug - a photo sharing site.

Using the web-platform is at the core of the Second Brain strategy. We are already using Amazon S3 for file-storage, and we are looking for other applications and services that we could integrate to expand our offering and functionality. What we really like about the Web platform is partly the ease of integration, but most of all, that we don't have to invent and build everything ourselves.

We also believe, that in the end, this will be a benefit for the users. Let say for instance that we want to offer photo sharing capabilities, or blogging. Instead of creating a brand new service, why not just use the APIs of Flickr and Typepad, and have people retrieve and publish from these already familiar services. Flock is doing this to leverage their browser, and I think this is the right way to go as far as competitiveness goes as well. We only want to compete on our core capabilities, for anything else, there is web-services and open APIs.