Blog Posts

Sorry-- I had this in my drafts from the WWDC 2007, and meant to publish it while I was attending the WWDC, but, um, I didn't. So here it is.. better late than never.
-Aaron

---

New visitors may not know that we are a "Apple Friendly" group of developers on this project.. which means that if everyone could have a Mac, they would, but in some cases it's not always practical. We have a few core members of the development team (Joao, Marcelo, and Rafael) who are in Brazil, where importing a Mac (or buying one local) can be even more expensive than the normal "high" prices one expects for Apple products. In spite of that, we are a focused on delivering Arcticfusion (and Coolerserver) first to the OS X Server environment, followed by Linux, and eventually Windows environments. This site, and the demo's you see are running on an Apple Intel OS X Server (10.4) as well.

As long time developers, and OS X Fans, we thought it natural for Webapplica, Inc to join the Apple Developer Community this past year, and this week I am attending my first WWDC conference. Hopefully, we are able to evangelize the Arcticfusion project, as well as gain some useful insight that might allow Arcticfusion some cool integration features when Leopard is released in October.

Technical Objectives:

Some of the items we are looking forward to learning more about are:

• Caldav development - learn more to help us decide if caldav is, with Apple's support, stable enough to for us to build new calendaring, collaboration, and document management tools that depending on the new protocol

Community Objectives:

Evangelize, and learn more about other people's project and goings-on

• http://www.ntractive.com - Elements application, seems to be offering many things that Arcticfusion strives towards, but closed source.

Joao asked me to write up the process I used to move our subversion repositories, so here it is.

This was actually embarassingly easy, considering the potential for problems!

Our old subversion repository was running on a RHEL/CENTOS 3.4 linux installation, using a httpd webdav, and the filesystem version of SVN.
The new server is an Intel OS X Server (10.4).

The steps I took.

First, I re-arranged the older svn folders using Finder, connecting as a webdav client. I though this would make things easier, because I knew I wouldn't be setting up webdav once I installed on the OSX server. However, in the end it turned out to be unnecessary, and it would have been nice to have keep a pristine "old" backup of the svn prior to the move (by simply shutting down the old server). Instead, even though it worked out fine, the old box has some of the re-arrangments commited.

After I liked my new layout I installed the Subversion server on OSX.

I had actually installed SVN about a week earlier (just for the client), but hadn't done anything with it, so forgive this part!
I either installed this http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo/ or I installed this: http://downloads.open.collab.net/binaries.html

I think I might have actually installed both of them, in that order. In any case, in the future I think I would use the collab.net install - since it seems destined to become the more 'official' release for all platforms.

I then followed these instructions to the letter (don't forget to read part 1) http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/osx/minisvn2.html

I made the repositories in /usr/local/svn-repos/webapplica

Next on the old server I ran:

svnadmin dump /var/lib/polarion/data/svn/repo | ssh -C x1.webapplica.com /usr/local/bin/svnadmin load /usr/local/svn-repos/webapplica

This moved the entire repository over from the old server and commited into the new server.

I changed the passwd file and added our existing users (I think). This is the only part of the process that I think is lame - this should rely on some system user/password list I think. I also had to do this by hand rather than copying from the old server, because the old server was running polarion, which was handling the user access.

I opened up the port in our firewall, and tested - everything looked good.

Finally I installed fisheye - You can check that out here: http://webapplica.org:8081/

All done.

Because I decided against using the webdav server (for now), we are using the native svn server, so the repository access is really simple now:

svn://webapplica.org

Piece of cake - now all that is left is for you guys to put the code back in working shape after I re-arranged everthing (that's probably the harder job).

-Aaron

The CoolerServer Platform

Is three components:

a) The Cooler Server – the program which runs on your server and
generates your website layout dynamically, by combining custom
templates with your stored data. The CSP handles all functional
elements of your site, such as shopping cart, user registration, activity
logging, and search.

b) The CSP Desktop – the web-based administration tool, which is web-
based and can be run from any compatible browser (IE, FireFox).

c) The Payment Server – an optional component that integrates all credit
card processing directly into your site, and the Desktop administration
tool.

CoolerServer Presentation Layer

CoolerServer sites are custom designed to your specifications. We are not a
“template” application, but we use templates to provide a customizable
presentation layer. Your content is then integrated by our application and
presented using this template presentation layer. We can modify the site
presentation to reflect almost any look you desire, or a trained designer of
your choice can build designs, which we can integrate. If you have design
staff, they can also be trained to modify the presentation layer without our
involvement. The few non-customizable areas of our application, such as the
flow of the checkout process, were carefully constructed to mimic the
behavior of the best sites on the web.

Basic principles of Coolerserver, as an e-commerce and content management system:

1. Your web presence is a marketing tool, but not a print advertisement.
The design philosophy is different, and must encompass the wide
variety of user platforms and equipment.
2. The front end of the applications must be as easy to use for your site
visitors as we can possibly make it
3. The back end of our application must be as easy to use for site owners
/ site managers as we can possibly make it
4. Consistency is the real key – keeping every headline the same size,
sparse use of bolded or italicized text and simple to use navigation in
the most important display features on your web site.

Posting the first blog entry is sort of a rough task, because it feels a little bit like an assignment in a writing class. I guess I should do all sorts of things, like tell you about Arctic Fusion (RIA Project to bring all other projects together and deliver peace to the world). I could tell you about the team (10 people full timers in United States Philippines, and Brazil). I should tell you that we have been at this for a while, (5 years), and how this is the perfection of our experience trying to build a RIA that brought business tasks together, but realistically, this is still just the beginning.

Well, I am not going to tell you about all those things, but rather, I am going to do what I think blogs are for:... rambling about some interesting things (to me) that I am seeing or thinking about.. usually related to the Arctic Fusion Project.

I thought I would start off with a list of sites that I have been looking at a lot lately. They are either sites that I think may have competing ideas, or maybe they are just plain expressing interesting ideas.. or maybe they are just interesting.

Check these out:
The Universal Desktop
Outsmart Labs
TechCrunch
Effective UI
ReadWriteWeb
DesktopTwo

I KNOW I have left out quite a few that I visit often, and I will add them when I hit them, but in the meantime I would love to hear of others you think are worth looking at!

-Aaron