From now on, I will regularly blog about work on new releases here at Mindquarry on my own blog. This includes the (user-centered) design phase and technical aspects from the point of a lead developer. I'd be glad if you have a look at it!

Posted at 07:15PM Mar 19, 2007 (Permalink) by Alexander Klimetschek with tags alexkli blog design development mindquarry  |  Share This Link

This is one of our interns, Jonas. He is a freshmen student at the Hasso Plattner Institute and was a finalist at the German Federal Informatics Contest for younger students in 2005/06. He's a tall guy and makes me always look up, but he is really already a skilled and talented programmer. The shot of him was done by Jan:

Jan is our second intern, hes a  freshmen student at the Hasso Plattner Institute too and he loves to mug us, mostly with Jonas' fat digital camera. Besides that he's a gifted and fast programmer and my development team is very lucky to have both in the team. His photo was made by Jonas.

For me, it's a very unique advantage to have our company located at the Hasso Plattner Technology Park, close to the Hasso Plattner Institute, which provides us those outstanding human capital. I hope we can provide Jan and Jonas a valuable learning time and a good team spirit during their intern to see them back again at the next opportunity. We are proud to have them among us.

Posted at 04:48PM Mar 14, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags development intern mindquarry team  |  Comments[2] Share This Link

Mindquarry recently entered a phase of intensive testing. This shall ensure that the first release of Mindquarry, which is targeted to the beginning of the next year, is working well and that the high quality pretensions of Mindquarry are fulfilled.

For this purpose we started looking around for open source tools that can be used for automated testing of web applications. After reading a bit about commercial solutions and trying HtmlUnit, I got a tip from Jeremy Quinn about Selenium.

Selenium is an open source framework for recording and executing unit tests for web applications in different browsers. It uses a proxy approach, which means the requests are send to a browser instance first. Afterwards the browser forwards the request to your web system. This allows reusing your unit tests for different browser without changing your test code (only a system property in our environment).

First of all, it took us some time to get Selenium running, but after that I was really impressed of it. Selenium provides a Firefox plugin which can be used for recording (and executing) test cases. Additionally you can export your tests to Java, C# or Ruby in order to run them within your test suite, e.g. as JUnit test.

Using this recording feature we were able to build a complete test suite for our application very fast. After having our test suite, we could run it against different browsers to check if the application is working with it. This reduced the testing effort enormously.

Another cool thing is, that the proxy browser approach supports testing all our AJAX and JavaScript stuff, which is nearly impossible with tools like HtmlUnit.

Finally one could say Selenium is a good candidate for web based open source projects, if they want to build a test suite. But one problem remains: the layout. Every web developer knows the problem of testing web layouts and styling in different browsers. Doing this by hand requires huge efforts.

At least is should be possible to reduce this efforts. We had the idea to automatically generate browser screenshots while executing our test suite and compare the results of different browsers afterwards.

Additionally our chief architect had the idea to compare the screenshots using fuzzy logic algorithms. But that's just an idea and we don't know if this is really possible, sounds like a research issue.

Next time I will write more about the results of our investigations.

Posted at 06:08PM Dec 27, 2006 (Permalink) by Alexander Saar with tags ajax development selenium softwarequality tests  |  Comments[1] Share This Link

Jeremy Quinn visited Mindquarry last week and helped us improving the Rich Text editing experience for the Wiki and the Task Manager, create a better widget to link tasks in the Task Manager to dependent tasks and related persons, to improve the ductile forms user experience and to create a Dojo-powered live-search using Solr. This impressive amount of work that has been done in the last week was possible due to working with the best experts, the best tools in a team that collaborates productively.

Posted at 10:38AM Dec 03, 2006 (Permalink) by Lars Trieloff with tags development dojo solr team  |  Share This Link

From the 2nd to 4th October two members of our team attended the Cocoon Gettogether 2006 in Amsterdam. Since Mindquarry is using Cocoon for its web presentation layer, it was quite important for us to get some insight into Cocoon and mostly get in touch with the Cocoon community. It was very interesting to see that Cocoon is being used as a professional tool, either as part of their product or service, or by providing consulting for others using Cocoon.

For the first two days we had a Hackathon, meaning everyone sat together, fixed bugs and hacked new features. On the third day the actual conference took place. Apart from Andrew's entertaining maven-scream presentation about Cocoon and it's community, the most interesting talks for us were about REST and Cocoon, the blocks protocol and the connection of Subversion and Solr. Another outcome was that a 2.2 final release is not too far away.

That is how it looked like at the Hackathon (yeah, don't let any sunlight distract our displays). Note the list of bugs to be fixed before leaving the room on the right!:

The venue was located at the Felix Meritis:

Amsterdams lovely Grachts:

Posted at 12:00AM Oct 09, 2006 (Permalink) by Alexander Klimetschek with tags amsterdam cocoon cocoongt2006 congress development  |  Share This Link