Progress Report #1

It’s been roughly 2.5 weeks since the beginning of the project’s first iteration, and it’s time for a little progress report.

The objectives of this first iteration are rather simple: set up the entire stack and see it in action. On the server side that means a single database table, entity bean, DAO, business logic and a few web services. Those services provide basic RUD functionality for objects in the DB table. The client app needs to show that it can use those services.

Java

I’m pretty much done with the Java code for this iteration.

I’m using Spring and Hibernate, both of which I never used before. They were pretty fast to learn.

My DB is MySQL for now – I’ll need to port to MS-SQL and Oracle. Hopefully that’ll work smoothly with Hibernate.

For the web services I’m using Axis 1.4, which I don’t like much, and is giving me some troubles. I might evaluate some alternatives later on.

Ruby

I haven’t started coding the Ruby system yet. So far I spent roughly two days learning the language and the Rails framework.

My job now is to develop a Rails application that works with the same DB on the back end, and exposes services that conform to the same WSDL on the front end.

My missions for the next week and a half are:

1. help the client team with the code that consumes my services.
2. plan the next iteration.
3. and most important – write some Ruby code.