Open ERP - Training module demo - concepts

Today I did a first demo of the Open ERP training module.

Of course this is not 100% finished but it is becoming workable. My customer was seriously pleased by the flexibility of the application. Automating administrative communications to participants and automating invoicing is a key decision factor.

Still the product is missing functionality for planning... I expected that remark and hope that can be worked out soon.

Summarizing this kind of application is difficult. Although I did a demo - 3-4 hours. I wanted to have a one page summary of the key concepts of the module.

Trying to connect entities quickly turned out into a spaghetti plate... so I removed most of the links and just defined major areas of the application to group concepts together.

Mind-mapping software usually promote the vision of a tree, from central to auxiliary concepts, in such situation such a diagram becomes impossible. I will come back in a few weeks to this as I am preparing my review of "Everything is Miscellaneous" from David Weinberger. Simple hierarchical modeling and classification are subjects to many pages in the book. I hope to add a software developer, database designer, knowledge worker perspective on these subjects as I found this book interesting but highly frustrating...

Back to blog - GWT stuff

No this blog isn't a dead!

So, yes! I did a small application using GWT for one of my customer. Basically a small alarm panel for a backend process. Deploying was only a matter of copying files.

Since then the compiler itself went open-source, the most serious concern for the adoption of GWT has been removed.

Yet my tech-support experience dislike the idea of developping in a language for debugging and testing then translating into something else for production. What if the translation isn't correct, how can you debug life with a customer, how will you work with your code integrated in a complex web project?

The best thing in GWT is that your code manipulate the native controls provided by the browser. That's the point, this is exactly what Sun should do instead of Java applets that live in their separate containers, the Java code should be easily able to manipulate the web browser content like Javascript is able to.

So lets hope GWT will make Sun rethink about the Applet technology to make a it a first class web browser citizen.