What's up with Hatim?

My summer of code midterm review was done and I am some what content with it. Although I have not been able to achieve much tangibally but I have covered some ground. My project involves some very interesting things most of which I had not touched before in my previous encouter with Spring/Hibernate. For now I am focused on finishing the task.

I am behind schedule so I am thinking of following tweaks to schedule. As you probably already know that I would be moving to Sweden soon, I will be going to another city and get some shopping done so I wont be working on 22nd - 25th. so skipping these days and just barely meeting the review deadline of 1st Sep 2008 I have a good 25 days left with me. I will be finalizing some stuff in the last days of August which I admit would be tricky as I would be in a totally different place.

My first actual task for the ERP application is to finalize the design of Graphical Modeler. This task involves understanding the complete user requirements, making their UML diagrams and documenting use cases. This particular exercise brought me back to learn UML after a long time. Last time I touched UML in detail was in 2002 in my OOP course. So I got a book called () th help me out in this.

UML is some thing which is to be taken lightly. You cannot draw all diagrams for a particular problem and you cannot nail the design in one go. It's a process which is very iterative. The end product is a design which is re-factored over many times from the original design. It is good to keep one's design simple, but I think this statement is overstated as well. Elegant designs are some times complex (for example there are complex systems which keep us alive while we are flying, and did i mention complex). Any who ISA-95 has 4 different basic models on top of which other models are built (namely personnel , equipment, material, process-segment).

We first started with most simple of them called the Personnel Model. As from a programmer point of view (and that too of an OO language) the crown jewel of all the UML design activity is a class diagram. Fortunately (or unfortunately) class diagrams are already suggested in the standard. In normal circumstances we reach to the class diagram through a methodological way, in which we happen to generate all other sorts of diagrams. But since we already had the class diagram the process becomes a bit fuzzy (since all other diagrams now have to suite the class diagram). But all in all I got to have 3 weeks of design only :)

Update: it seems that design phase will go on for some more period of time as well.

After some deliberation and reviewing some good pointers from Matt Raible java framework presentations, we (at work) chose to go with Spring-MVC for our ERP project. The choice was very simple, Spring 2.0 provides us with options which are very advanced and would not only help us make an application which is contemprary in design, but would also be very manageable.

I know about spring from OpenNMS as they are very fond of it. I hope that after learning the ropes of spring I would be able to contribute to OpenNMS. Our first task was to make a sample Spring-Hibernate application showing i8ln and AJAX. We chose Google Web Toolkit as our view technology. Even though I was suppose to work on the testing of the system, I some how found my self doing the view part. The toughest part of GWT-Spring project is it's integration. GWT basically throws out a bunch of html and java script which is then used along with a server side portion programmed in spring. Every call is an RPC which makes things bit tricky. In short we were unable to write a simple application in 3 days just because of integration.

We will be focusing on using other view technologies like tiles, dwr etc to get our view component done. But I will definetly lookinto GWT more thoroughly at a later point.

I have been working to extend my typo based website. Firstly after a discussion over the latest features of Typo in #typo channel of irc.freenode.net, I decided to give the SVN trunk a try. I also looked up a decent theme from typo garden to fulfill my needs (until the day I make my own theme)

One thing which I have not been able to work out is an easy way to route the main page of my site to /blog/pages/home..I am now able to route easily to pages within my typo blog using proxy option ([P]) of mod_rewrite.

Following '.htaccess' file is similar to what I have used...

Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^$ http://site.com/path_to_view [P]

 

The result is that I have pages which can be accessed from outside URL, but are still controlled by Typo.

These are interesting times to be an open source developer. Google Sumer of code enters its third year in 2007 and this time the process has started earlier than previous years. As I am registered as part time certificate course student at Virtual university of Pakistan, I can take part in this competition. I have used open source for around seven years now and have yet to give back some thing solid to the open source community (occasional irc help secessions and little bit of wiki editing is good but not a very big contribution in my opinion). I feel that if I am able to be a part of Google summer of code this year, not only I would be giving back to the community in a structured way, but I would also be learning a lot from seasoned hackers and developers who would be mentoring me.

I am not certain what mentoring organizations are expecting in an application. I don't think the mentors should be expecting the participants to know a lot about their project as the whole point of SOC is to make new people come into open source development. But at the same time if some one has worked with the project in question in the past (s/he may be part of code project team and a student as well), that person would be a better catch. As for me I am applying to the projects which are of technical/intellectual interest to me or solve some important problem that I have encountered.

I will be posting a few apps within next 24 hours. I will try to supplement them with web pages on this site. I hope at least this application process will be a good experience for me to polish my writing skills.