randrteam team mailing list archive

[John Richmond IV <john4@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

It is now June, but the May Release is ready.

The May Release was primarily PPA packaging and a few bug fixes to
stabilize the instances.  We were successful in accomplishing this
objective.  But then we got greedy and decided to expand the scope of
effort to include the Web Business Suite.

As a refresher, the Rental Portal project is a variation of the
eBusiness Suite (EBS) which is going to become the base EBS. EBS
includes the Order Entry Portal (OEP), OEP Information Portal, Financial
Portal (FP), FP Information Portal, and Data Migration Portal.  EBS is
our web transaction system.

The Web Business Suite (WBS) includes Order Portal (OP), OP Information
Portal, Sales Portal (SP), SP Information Portal, and Data Migration
Portal.  WBS is our web front-end for EBS and other legacy systems.

Both WBS and EBS/Rental Portal can operate as stand alone or integrated
systems.

The delay in the May Release is due to our desire to create a super
project in LaunchPad so we can have a single PPA for both suites.  We
will still keep a PPA for each suite individually.  Ubuntu approved the
super project this week and we are just waiting for their implementation
of it so we can complete the May Release.  We are thinking we should be
done in the next couple of weeks.

It was worth the effort.  We learned more than we ever wanted to know
about Debian packaging, but the community was great in supporting us.
Our preliminary tests of the PPA packaging indicates that it is a major
set up from more manual installation techniques.

We will keep you posted.

As a footnote, the next releases of the suites will be in November.  We
went to the Google I/O conference in May and it was superior.  Google
sent us Droid phones prior to the conference so we were able to test
both the WBS and EBS/Rental Portal prior to attending.  A little clumsy,
but they worked.

The design points for the November (10.11) release will be to add Google
Web Toolkit (GWT) to the development environment, this will be
especially relevant to rationalizing and improving the JSP, screen real
estate, CSS and enable much easier changes and maintenance to the GUI.
Additionally, we will add mobility for both suites, Google Visualization
to the Information Portals, and we will be removing 100 (1000) paper
cuts in the suites (please let me know your favorites/most painful). 

We are also experimenting with various API's into the Google Cloud
Applications like Doc's, Gmail, and Maps.

Finally, we should have a Sand Box of both suites running up on Amazon's
EC2 Cloud by the end of the month.  Functional testing will be done in
the Sand Box and once approved released to the PPA. 

If you have any thoughts or input please let us know.

Thank you,
-- 
John Richmond IV
-----------------
Randr, Inc.
951-369-3427
951-787-8683 Fax
www.randrinc.com