An Afterthought
This blog is an afterthought, one that came to me like so: I was happily doing some web 2.0 development, testing in Firefox with those very useful add-ons and it was all looking good. Then I thought I'd better make sure it worked in IE which is always slightly annoying since the computer that has it installed isn't mine.
Having successfully negotiated use of the test machine, "I'll prepare you a hot chocolate if you let me use your lappy", I was ready to do my 5 minutes of validation before calling it a night. There was no way it was going to take longer than that, after all my code was W3C compliant. What could possibly go wrong?
IE bombed out with it's usual ironic error message (you know, the one that is supposed to be helpful but is actually almost completely pointless). It soon became apparent that the only reliable way to fix the problem was to bombard the search engines with questions until they revealed the answer. On this occasion it came in the form of a tech-site written in that unique form of hispano-germano-cyrillo english that you are probably familiar with.
Anyhow, this got me thinking. Wouldn't it be great to write down all the issues I encounter for the duration of the project with details of how I solve them so that others can benefit? What a unique and genius idea! Then I realised that actually it wasn't unique, that hispano-germano-cyrillo-english guy had already thought of it (along with millions of others). Nonetheless, I concluded that it was still a good idea to document the project since there was bound to be at least one person who would find it useful.
That is why this journal is an afterthought and because it is an afterthought, it has come into existence just over 1 year since the project began. So, let me give you a brief run down of what has happened so far.
My Approach
Firstly, I decided that this would be purely my own work. No partners, no clients (like I can just choose to have clients), no other developers, no time schedules, no one to answer to: fantastic. Embarking on a project with that mindset makes a huge difference.
Being my own client I told myself that all I wanted was a quick brochure site that I could start e-marketing within a few days. I toyed with the idea of using java but then I decided if I wanted to do things quickly it would have to be done in perl. Perl development is fast anyway and on top of that I had tried and tested libraries that I had built up over the years which would make it even faster.
I set to work to get a couple of pages with fresh content, good usability, nicely styled (isn't that subjective?), targeted meta data and compliant mark-up. You know, all the elements needed for SEO if you believe in that particular form of occultism. Then I used a bit of web 2.0 magic so that I could display my holiday snaps in a single compact page. Finally, I implemented the google maps API so that users could get a bearing of where the apartment is, and an AJAX control so that they could send me coords of areas of interest. Next I went shopping for a domain name with my favourite registrar, and set up hosting with them as well. An hour after that, I had deployed my new web app and registered it with the search engines.
A final step was needed: approval from one of the world's greatest consumers and avid on-line reader. I showed the site to my girlfriend and watched her expectantly. She stared at the monitor for a couple of seconds, then her hand moved tentatively towards the mouse. She retracted it before it got there and turned to face me.
"Shall we go dancing tonight?" she blurted out.
Success!
How The Website Has Grown
The website has changed a lot since then. Without going into great detail this is what I did on the technical front:
As far as what is considered creative in the traditional way, even though personally I consider software development just as if not more creative, this is what I got up to:
The Big Decision
By this time the site was attracting enough traffic to get a couple of enquiries about the property. More importantly, it felt like the code was solid. I had adequate unit test coverage, was working on integration tests using selenium IDE and a proper error notification framework made sure I fixed defects pretty quickly.
Also at this time, it came to be that an acquaintance who owns an apartment in Bulgaria as well, demanded that I add a page for his property to my site. My defences had been weakened by the effect of beer and I responded enthusiastically "Yeah, no problem. Get me another drink, will you?"
So I was faced with this question. Should I
The answer to this dilemma is obvious and as far as I can remember these are the steps (more or less in order) that bring us to today:
Requirement 1: set up a straight through processing form that,
Requirement 2: use the data collected from requirement 1 to create a single HTML page per property.
Requirement 3: the property owner should be able to manage the content related to their property.
This blog is an afterthought, one that came to me like so: I was happily doing some web 2.0 development, testing in Firefox with those very useful add-ons and it was all looking good. Then I thought I'd better make sure it worked in IE which is always slightly annoying since the computer that has it installed isn't mine.
Having successfully negotiated use of the test machine, "I'll prepare you a hot chocolate if you let me use your lappy", I was ready to do my 5 minutes of validation before calling it a night. There was no way it was going to take longer than that, after all my code was W3C compliant. What could possibly go wrong?
IE bombed out with it's usual ironic error message (you know, the one that is supposed to be helpful but is actually almost completely pointless). It soon became apparent that the only reliable way to fix the problem was to bombard the search engines with questions until they revealed the answer. On this occasion it came in the form of a tech-site written in that unique form of hispano-germano-cyrillo english that you are probably familiar with.
Anyhow, this got me thinking. Wouldn't it be great to write down all the issues I encounter for the duration of the project with details of how I solve them so that others can benefit? What a unique and genius idea! Then I realised that actually it wasn't unique, that hispano-germano-cyrillo-english guy had already thought of it (along with millions of others). Nonetheless, I concluded that it was still a good idea to document the project since there was bound to be at least one person who would find it useful.
That is why this journal is an afterthought and because it is an afterthought, it has come into existence just over 1 year since the project began. So, let me give you a brief run down of what has happened so far.
My Approach
Firstly, I decided that this would be purely my own work. No partners, no clients (like I can just choose to have clients), no other developers, no time schedules, no one to answer to: fantastic. Embarking on a project with that mindset makes a huge difference.
Being my own client I told myself that all I wanted was a quick brochure site that I could start e-marketing within a few days. I toyed with the idea of using java but then I decided if I wanted to do things quickly it would have to be done in perl. Perl development is fast anyway and on top of that I had tried and tested libraries that I had built up over the years which would make it even faster.
I set to work to get a couple of pages with fresh content, good usability, nicely styled (isn't that subjective?), targeted meta data and compliant mark-up. You know, all the elements needed for SEO if you believe in that particular form of occultism. Then I used a bit of web 2.0 magic so that I could display my holiday snaps in a single compact page. Finally, I implemented the google maps API so that users could get a bearing of where the apartment is, and an AJAX control so that they could send me coords of areas of interest. Next I went shopping for a domain name with my favourite registrar, and set up hosting with them as well. An hour after that, I had deployed my new web app and registered it with the search engines.
A final step was needed: approval from one of the world's greatest consumers and avid on-line reader. I showed the site to my girlfriend and watched her expectantly. She stared at the monitor for a couple of seconds, then her hand moved tentatively towards the mouse. She retracted it before it got there and turned to face me.
"Shall we go dancing tonight?" she blurted out.
Success!
How The Website Has Grown
The website has changed a lot since then. Without going into great detail this is what I did on the technical front:
- I packaged it up properly so that it could be reliably deployed in various (linux and FreeBSD) environments by referencing an appropriate configuration file.
- I improved my publication technology so that it was able to publish in static or dynamic mode.
- I modified my templating technology so that code was naturally divided into cohesive units.
- I improved my core javascript library so that it had inherent support for AJAX calls.
- I added a whole load of custom UI tags.
As far as what is considered creative in the traditional way, even though personally I consider software development just as if not more creative, this is what I got up to:
- I added guides with photos (my holiday pictures). For the guides I did some on-line research, had conversations with people from the area and added my personal experience.
- I picked up a few other pictures with appropriate creative commons licenses and in doing so I had to improve my image widget so that I could properly attribute the photos.
- I integrated skyscanner mini.
The Big Decision
By this time the site was attracting enough traffic to get a couple of enquiries about the property. More importantly, it felt like the code was solid. I had adequate unit test coverage, was working on integration tests using selenium IDE and a proper error notification framework made sure I fixed defects pretty quickly.
Also at this time, it came to be that an acquaintance who owns an apartment in Bulgaria as well, demanded that I add a page for his property to my site. My defences had been weakened by the effect of beer and I responded enthusiastically "Yeah, no problem. Get me another drink, will you?"
So I was faced with this question. Should I
create another static HTML page for his propertyenhance the web app so he could add and manage his property and in doing so allowing anyone to do the same with theirs?- or -
The answer to this dilemma is obvious and as far as I can remember these are the steps (more or less in order) that bring us to today:
Requirement 1: set up a straight through processing form that,
- creates a user account with contact information,
- allows the user to enter property address, descriptive details, select from a list of communal and private facilities, property meta data, season dates, rental rates, rental and payment terms, photos with meta data and of course map coordinates.
- I used the above requirement with bit of agile modelling (scribbled on a piece of paper which was ultimately destined for the bin) to design the relational object model.
- From the object model I derived a database schema.
- I set up a data system for my web app which hooks into mysql, and coded up repeatable and reversible scripts for
- creating the schema
- populating standing data
- validating (at a basic level) data integrity
- Then I wrote a load of perl modules which together forms the data access layer of my web app.
Requirement 2: use the data collected from requirement 1 to create a single HTML page per property.
- I had most of the technology for this, all I needed was to code up a component that extracted the data and then used my publishing and templating technologies to create the HTML.
- I added support for scheduled publication of property pages (with cron) and the ability to publish a single page or the whole lot.
Requirement 3: the property owner should be able to manage the content related to their property.
- I dug out an old library that I wrote for an authenticated web session. I improved it (a hell of a lot) until it was a proper MVC system using the command and front controller patterns (I know, it's not a J2EE project but it's a good pattern) as the core framework.
- I added support to the MVC framework so that I could plug my publishing and templating technologies into it.
- Then for each object model I coded create, read, update and delete functionality.
Leave a comment