Minutes from our Zero Application Review Meeting

Don Boulia - Reserve Application

Application that does an internal room scheduling application. PHP and Groovy with REST and a Mashup. Hosted on bluehost.

• http://zero.webahead.ibm.com:8090/reserveapp/Login.html
• A built in Login panel would be useful
• Need utilities for doing auth against backend resource when you do not control the backend. Needed to implement subset of curl in php to do this. Very manual today
• Had painful screen scraping code to extract information from the reserve app... screen scraping utilities would be useful
• Dojo layout of the page was painful
• Hardest part was the Web UI front end.. scared to make changes...
• Built the UI as a set of composite widgets and then built the page from a small collection of custom composite widgets
• Building the custom widgets involved lots of files and tests per widget
• Testing the widgets required unit tests per widget because getting things to work together was really messy
• Firebug was essential and development would be impossible without it
• CSS/HTML/JS combination was difficult... need a tool
• Deploying and redeploying to bluehost was difficult
• Resolve does not seem to work in an obvious way... always seems to get the wrong stuff
• Need to support running on a JRE not JDK, at least for deployment but maybe for development too
• Potentially an issue with Shared classes in the JDK
• Proxy config and port assignment in shared environments makes things difficult.
• Error messages suck... stack traces are not useful... need to go to a person to figure out how to move forward
• Dual language support not enabled by default.. adding PHP resets default extension mapping to not work for Groovy any more

Brett - Catalog

• Really slow load time... Dojo.. and loading the data...
• No paging right now.. need to page on the server.. that is not easy.. no built in support for paging interaction patterns
  • Need paging linked to the Dojo/Client layer
• Interaction between services (comments and ratings) and the list for sort is complex
• Dojo learning curve..
  • 9 custom Dojo widgets
  • Client side MVC model
  • Documentation lacking
• Some syntax differences between Java and Groovy to learn... mostly differences in Zero APIs (such as zero.data)
• Documentation has examples in one language or the other, but not consistently in all languages
• Migration is not fun.. need to have a strong focus on keeping things working...
• Event model worked well (log event) for download counting
• Security configuration had pros/cons
  • configuring dependencies' security rules difficult because the dependencies do not configure security and user needs to understand URI structure to define the rules
• Logging setup is too complex.... no ability to turn on global trace simply and no ability to do tracing by module name
• Poor error messages (too obscure)
• Needed dev vs test vs deployment configurations
  • Which user registry?, which db?, logging settings?
• A trace/log file viewer would be useful...
• Breakpoints not working properly in Groovy
• Should we eliminate stack traces from the "experience with Zero"?
• Should we have a more formal testing methodology backed into Zero?
• Complexity managing multiple repositories from the tools (multiple local repositories)
• Need a web page design tool for the UI
• Trash.Versioning does not take milestones into account
• Groovy code completion
• Most of the time is spent on the UI code

Binh - Zero Zone

• Implemented in Groovy and Dojo
• Backend development is very easy at this point
• UI development is very hard
• 90% of time on UI
• JSLint would be useful
• Built a set of custom widgets for the app
• Need to automate Dojo compression step
• CSS inheritence with Dojo widgets not easy because of page level CSS
• Not helping with the tooling experience around logical entities (aka widgets) to make things easier to navigate and maintain
• Hard to debug SQL statements (invalid arguments).. need to see raw SQL sent to the DB.. sometimes related to Groovy issues (GString)
  • Better error messages around invalid arguments
• GString vs String is non-intuitive
• Using JSON, Dojo, Data, Security, Atom, Core, Some begin events, creating some custom events
• Doing dynamic includes where content has to go in the HEAD section is problematic.... need a model for this...
• No support for selective display of UI elements based on user rights
• Designer role complicated by Dojo (skill mismatch)

Todd - User Service

• Dojo IO XHR code is repetitive
• Used Java for most of the logic instead of groovy
• How do we enable Dojo distribution via CDN?