First the intranet, now the internet

So I brought the first task upon myself. I knew our legacy intranet application needed upgrading. I had been reading much about OO and frameworks and such. I decided it would be good for me to learn all the 'better' ways to program, and good for the longevity of the application for it to undergo a redesign.

However, a redesign on the website was not my idea. This is the idea of the marketing manager and the communications director. They both have lots of ideas for making the our internet site more better. Or is it just more? I've started reading some white papers and articles about simplicity. 37signals has some great ideas. They sell a pdf on their practices and philosophy that suggests software today is bloated, complicated and dripping with mediocrity. They say it is better to provide less and do it well.

This will be a struggle as some of the new ideas may be good ones, but we may need to try to balance between what really makes sense for the users of our website and what we think they would like to see. Some of the ideas include adding forums and rss feeds. I find both of these things extremely useful to myself for researching and keeping up on various topics of interest to me.

It is hard to say whether our website would benefit from such 'features'. I need to do some research to see what is already out there in the way of forums and blogs for the science community. I have a feeling someone else is already covering these pretty well. Guess it's time do some old-fashioned surfing.

Now trying Mach-II

After some time away from working on the TKS rewrite (due to Christmas and other more urgent projects), I started looking at it again last week. I'm finding Fusebox to be a bit cumbersome, at least to do in the OO way I am attempting. It seemed unclear where to put various pieces of code and such. Working in about 3 or 4 circuit.xml files got confusing.

So now I am trying to learn and use Mach-II which is a framework created by at least one of the same developers that created Fusebox. Mach-II is meant to encourage/enforce a more Object-Oriented type of development. It has one mach-ii.xml file where events, listeners and views go. So far I've only been working on a login form, but I think I understand the basic setup.

That's it for now. Oh, and of course this post was instigated by an email threatening to shut down my blog if there wasn't some sort of entry. :)

TKS rewrite

I'm attempting another rewrite of TKS using Fusebox 4.1 and Object-Oriented techniques via ColdFusion Components. So far I have the basics of the AdrMas screen done. I've been putting quite a few objects in as session variables, because I've seen that used by other examples. Hopefully this won't be too burdensome on the server.