Boy does time fly! I remember leaving my workplace and starting my degree in computer sciences as if it was a few weeks ago. Turns out that more than 2 years have passed, and I’m already in the middle of my senior year.
Its been a strange journey. I’m guessing it was a bit different from an ordinary Joe’s degree, as I came in with about 8 years of professional experience in software development. But when you know a topic and restudy it from the basics, you can reflect on different aspects of it, and still learn a lot.
My Graduate Project
As part of my study program, I must participate in a final project in system analysis, in which I must analyze a client’s domain, propose a software-based solution and develop it.
I am also taking a course on project management by Alex Coman, which also happens to be my graduate project director. Earlier this year, I gave a lecture on Regionerate and its project management. Mr. Coman seemed to like it, so he suggested I base my graduate project on Regionerate.
Not an Ordinary Project
As I said, the graduate project should be based on an actual business (as in “the laundry place down the street”), and we are supposed to analyse its core problems. After doing that, we need to build up a classic 3-tier architecture app and deploy it at the customer’s site.
Needless to say, Regionerate is not a business, its an open-source project, there is no single client to answer all the questions, and it is not a classic 3-tier application.
Mr. Coman is aware of those differences, and he is OK with us going a different path which is more suitable for this kind of project.
So What Are We Developing?
A UI for building code layouts.
According to feedback I got over the years, most of our users use the default code layouts that ship with the installation, and only make tiny differences to it.
Why? Because we are all lazy, and the code layout schema is scary. Heck, I even get scared of it sometimes.
I think that you will agree that one of Regionerate’s strengths is that it is very customizable, but what good is that strength if most users are intimidated by the code layout schema?
So we are going to develop a drag-n-drop interface for creating code layouts, one that will hopefully help more people take advantage of Regionerate’s highly customizable layout abilities.
Your Help
This project will take a few months, and we want to make decisions with you guys. So we will be putting polls on big decisions we need to make.
These polls and the results are part of the graduate project, and Mr. Coman will be inspecting those, so if you want to help us out – participate in the polls and add your comments. These will eventually be pasted into the project paper, so your participation will be appreciated.
Off we go. Wish us luck.
Hi, Rauchy.
Success with your graduation project. I used to use Regionerate before. There are some pains in it that made me not reinstall/use it, especially in a corporate environment. One of the pain points is (you already mention it yourself) the way templates are created. I am (apparently one of the few) one of those who created completely new templates. If I go brainstorming a bit the following features come to mind:
– you could create the drag and drop editor online (you can actually base some kind of business model on it through advertising). I created something similar. I can give you the following advise: “use an existing javascript framework like jQuery or MooTools”, it’ll make your life easy.
– you can host and provide templates committed by users to your users as a service.
– allow company wide distribution of the templates, through a company-local repository or something similar. This is a pain point, when you work in a corporate environment it’s a pain to make everybody use the same templates and the same version of the template.
– it would be nice to be able to validate code files against a template in some way. So that we can check code layout during CI builds or source control commits.
Posted by Koen on December 28th, 2009 6:55 pm
Koen,
These are some really interesting ideas.
Some of them might be a little big for the scope of the graduate project.
Originally I had thought of developing this as a WPF standalone application which would run after installation,
but your idea sets up the ground for a much bigger project with collaboration built-in.
I will raise this for a vote.
Thanks for your feedback and hope you keep following and helping us with this project’s development.
Posted by rauchy on December 29th, 2009 8:02 am
I just unknowingly put a similar, although simpler, version of Koen’s thoughts on the “vote for the UI” page. I thought it would be good to dupe it here to make sure it was seen. Anything that would facilitate company-wide distro of templates would be great (I suggested allowing persistence to something like google docs).
Allowing sharing of templates online is really cool as well, but I definitely see your point about trying to limit the scope.
Posted by pj on January 15th, 2010 10:47 am
pj,
I may have found a cool & easy to implement solution to both problems.
Will blog about it soon and put it up for a vote.
Posted by rauchy on January 15th, 2010 10:59 am