The question says it all, we know most of the hosted web-based UI prototyping tools out there, but we would like to have ours hosted on our own internal servers, preferably with on-line multi-user collaboration functionality (i.e. users modifying the prototype, making comments, etc. in parallel).
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Sketchflow (in the top-end version of Expression Blend from Microsoft) meets almost all your criteria. It ain't cheap, but it is very powerful.
The deployment package of a Sketchflow build can just be placed on an internal server (no IIS required to deploy).
Multiple users can overlay their comments and pen drawings over the top of the screens. Their feedback is packaged as a unit and sent back. All feedback can then be loaded back into the Expression Blend project and the feedback from 1 or more users viewed overlaid on the correct screens.
It does not meet your multiple-user authoring requirement though, but as they say "too many cooks...".
Most tools are either desktop based or hosted. Seen very few which offer a downloadble multi user version. iRise is one choice with the editor as a desktop product and a centralized server for sharing among users. The budget is typically from $50K to $250K. A similar option exists for Serena composer as well, not sure of the price though.
Both iRise and Serena are not real collaborative tools, the central server is only for sharing the finished prototypes and getting feedback.
If the requirement is for a completely web based multi user tool then 10screens can be an option - http://www.10screens.com. The same product available on the site in a hosted mode can be downloaded and installed on your own servers.
Related
We have an existing cross-platform Mobile Application, that also has an accompanying web application, that uses AWS as a back end (RDS for Database, Four server instances, and a Load Balancer to distribute traffic). APK and IPA files are packaged and sent to the stores, while components are retrieved from our server per request, which enables us to reduce the number of store builds, and make the process easier for getting changes out to clients.
We are at the stage of Development that we need to move to another platform to better facilitate our fast growing client base.
Due to the conditions upon our clients, these things must be considered.
must be cross platform (Android / iOS).
must be offline based (users need to be able to access without an internet connection)
must be able to sync with an existing database when there is a connection
requires Authentication
Cloud based (? may not be the right term, but meaning the ability for us to store components on a server and have a device check for updates and download a local copy - enabling us to work and distribute fixes faster)
Ideally compatible with AWS
We are currently looking at Xamarin to facilitate us for this move, however there is a lot of documentation and plugins out there to do all sorts of different things.
As developers, we all have some .net / c# experience, however none particularly with Xamarin.
We have a particular timeline that we need to adhere to (and need to ramp up in the next couple of weeks), and right now are essentially stuck in Limbo in a research phase, as we can't afford to get some things right. We are unable to move forward until we know Xamarin (or some other framework) is able to do everything that we need it to do.
It's hard to escape from the 'code it all ourselves' mentality - especially as we don't know where to start looking in terms of third party packages for Xamarin, and their documentation itself.
A lot of documentation mentions various systems of Azure - we would not be against moving to Azure over AWS if it _had to be done*, but because of the existing infrastructure with AWS - staying with AWS is obviously the preferred option (users need to access the current system whilst we build the new system)
This stack overflow post is to ask for recommendations, comments, or other observations on anything and everything involved with the process in regards to choosing frameworks, design patterns, methodologies, third party packages, etc.
Obviously we would like to use best practises for everything moving forward for optimum scalability and cleaner, more robust code. It's just hard to know where to start!
Any input will be highly appreciated.
Cheers!
edit: I am aware that this is 'asking for recommendations' which is 'specifically off-topic'. I have read the posting guidelines about open ended discussion, and am quite confident that this case is different. There is an underlying problem here, in that we are seeking advice on combinations of frameworks and plugins that are fully compatible with all of the items in the list (above)
Let's try to breakdown each of your requirement and constraint mentioned in the question.
1. You need a offline first architecture (With Sync mechanism)
Xamarin + Azure would make a good comdo for you, as it would support offline storage out of box (With a simple PullAsync call).
Albeit there are AWS SDK available for Xamarin. Here it goes http://docs.aws.amazon.com/mobile/sdkforxamarin/developerguide/setup.html
So the call is yours. There are few other ways to achieve caching offline storage in Xamarin, you can build upon those strategy in your logic. Alternatively there is a very interesting C# library Akavache for caching and offline storage.
2. OAuth 2.0 Authentication
Xamarin has a very good library named Xamarin.Auth. Though I would not say it is very easily extendible at this but there has been some serious work going on from Xamarin on this library.
But I would say it is very easy to use. The apps I have developed so far that includes - Google OAuth, Facebook integration, Microsoft account integration. It worked fine for all of them.
3. Cloud based distribution
There are nice tools available with Microsoft. Which makes the distribution easy. Have a look at https://mobile.azure.com . Also hockeyApp is good for distribution I found.
Where to start:
A very good starting point for you would be https://channel9.msdn.com . Just go there search with keyword "Xamarin" and view some videos. May be all these cross platform dynamics will be much easier for you.
Overall I found Xamarin a cool product to work with. Because anything that can be done in native Objective C/Swift or Java can very well be done in Xamarin using C#.
I am considering using a web application in place of a traditional UI to control an imaging system. The UI will allow the user to do things like change settings, upload scripts, start/stop data acquisition, view data, etc... Rather than a monolithic UI that "does everything", an embedded controller would interact with system hardware and control the process, receiving commands from the UI over a local network.
I would probably use a javascript toolkit or perhaps some .Net technology to build the web application. A few of the advantages I see are:
Access UI from any browser.
No software to install.
Access remotely if necessary.
View status/data from multiple computers simultaneously.
Modular (separation of concerns)
Data as a web service.
A few of my concerns would be:
Lack of a comprehensive widget toolkit.
Supporting multiple browsers, this may not be as bad as I think now with HTML5.
Updating the UI from the server.
My questions are, Is this common? Is it a bad idea?
If it's really subjective, I understand, however, I just wanted to see if there is an obvious answer, like "DON'T DO IT!!!!"
It is very common. I do it all the time, particularly for a closed community of users such as you will have.
It might be different if this was a public facing device, but it is not.
You are going to support more devices by saying "you must have an HTML 5 browser" than if you said "You must have a PC" or "You must have a Mac"
In terms of your concerns, I do not see any of them as being an issue.
It is easier to deploy a UI upgrade once to the imaging controller than many times to all of the client machines.
There are all of the widgets that you could ever want available for HTML 5 compatible browsers
You answered your own question about cross browser issues. HTML 5 browsers are free so there is no downside for people to upgrade to them and you have the entire weight of the world wide web pushing them to upgrade to take advantage of what can be done with HTML 5 so users have a big incentive to upgrade. I do not run into any push back when I require a closed group to use an HTML 5 compatible browser. And if you want to be kind to those that don't have html 5, you can always use modernizr.
It is a good idea - and there is plenty of examples and ways of doing what you want to do.
What's your experience in using web technologies (HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript) to implement part of the functionality of a GUI application? Pros and cons, please.
No servers, relational databases, AJAX, or cookies for session management, nor an existing webapp either, but rather a GUI app that uses web widgets (like Qt WebKit) to render and handle substantial parts of the UI, while taking advantage of a GUI framework to achieve an even richer interaction and better desktop integration.
I've already validated that the approach is possible using PyQt. Content can be rendered from the file system or from strings, and URL requests (images or clicks) can be captured and served by the form's event handlers. CSS and JavaScript are supported, perhaps with some limitations.
# ...
self.webView.page().setLinkDelegationPolicy(
QtWebKit.QWebPage.DelegateExternalLinks
)
#...
class TotiMainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):
def linkClicked(self, url):
pass # events arrive here
Note: This question is different from this one and this one made before, among other things because there is no requirement to use web technologies on the GUI, but there is the requirement that the application should work without a network connection available, and should integrate well with the default desktop over different platforms, without previous infrastructure requirements (no .NET, Java, browsers, or database servers).
Note: I posted a different version of this question on PMS but found very little experience with this approach there.
Closing Note
I just found most of the information I was looking for in a series of blog posts by André Pareis.
I think the largest advantage to using web markup like HTML/CSS and other web technologies is that desktop apps may very well have their days numbered.
As we speak, Google engineers are working on the Chromium OS, which essentially consists of a single GUI application... the browser...
Now, while nothing may never actually come of it, there is clearly a rising trend in the number of applications accessible through a web browser, accessible anywhere. It seems to me that this is the future of application development.
By using these technologies, this becomes one less headache you have to deal with when or if you determine that your app should be available as a web application.
Update: A few years ago, we developed an Agent Desktop for our call center that is essentially a local application that opens sockets to integrate with the phone system. The user interface the agents use is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and the experience is stunning. When we released our latest update in 2010 with a professional CSS redesign, our agents were all very impressed with not only how easy it was to interact but also how easy it was to use.
In the future we will port this 100% to the browser, but for now it needs to be a local application because of the COM integration with the phone system.
We did exactly this for a project back when Windows XP was new.
This gave my team several benefits:
A good-looking UI with relatively little effort
Easily change the style of the UI in a consistent manner using CSS
Relatively simple integration with C++ (invoking functions from the ui and vice versa)
The drawbacks we saw were:
Some not-so-good firewalls considered accessing internal resources (ie other html pages in the ui) to be a web request
Adding and accessing the needed resources could in some cases be a bit cumbersome
It was possible set properties in Internet Explorer that would prevent JS from running in the application
Note that some of Windows XP:s programs are using this approach.
This probably works best with small, more Wizard-like parts of the ui (which our ui consisted almost entirely of).
I have since then not really been involved in ui projects, so I cannot really tell you whether this approach is still valid... I know that MFC-based applications will let you use HTML-based dialogs though.
In a similar situation in 2005 I created a stand-alone webapp using XForms, CSS, JavaScript, XML and XML Schema for offline data retrieval and verification. With a good XForms -> HTML + JS transformer (Chiba) it did the job with no bug fixes after the initial release. It was used for 6-12 months (IIRC) by about a dozen engineers for a project gathering test data in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider. The biggest surprise of that project was just how much you get for free when going for a web platform, even for offline use. Highly recommended.
The major problem is that it reduces your development speed, or the quality of your user interface. A lot. Unless you're using Seaside, it is much faster to develop a desktop app.
There is quite some number of applications built on top of Mozilla platform. It isn't 100% web technology, as instead of HTML you use XML based XUL, but the rest is indeed web stack (JavaScript, CSS). The most successful of these it the OpenKomodo and it's commercial big brother Komodo IDE.
On the other hand, as far as Qt goes, the newest version 4.7 you can build GUI using QML language. Don't let the name mislead you, it's not markup, it acctually JavaScript with app-specific extensions.
So I just started an internship with this nonprofit company and it's pretty cool. My first assignment was to find a type of program that would work well for the company and its users. I and some team members just finished summarizing down what I think is a good list for the needed functionality. Before I started working, I've never even heard of content/document/knowledge/project management systems. So I've done a bit of research on many other programs and I've narrowed it down to Joomla, activeCollab, Basecamp, sharepoint and a few more. Which program out there would fit my needs the best? It doesn't have to be from the list I just wrote, those are just the programs that popped up first when I started searching.
MUST-HAVE CAPABILITIES
Searchable
Keyword search
Advanced search: Ability to tag & search documents by different categories, for example, type of file (e.g. PDF, Word, etc.), service line (e.g., fundraising, strategy, etc.), type of document (e.g., deliverable, data set, etc.)
In-document search
Categorization
Simple navigation to browse all content
Simple to set up and modify the tree/hierarchy used to browse content
Workrooms
Provide each team a separate workroom to post their own documents
Easy to navigate from team workrooms to the Toolkits (best if team workrooms reside in the same system the toolkits reside)
Version Control
Ability to see which is the most recent file
Security
Password protected
Tiered security, i.e. certain permissions for certain users (to create workrooms, change navigation tree, change toolkits, view/post team files, etc.)
Multi-year support
Easy to “archive” old workrooms or files so the navigation doesn’t become cluttered over time
Share across workgroups
Ability for power users to access multiple team workrooms
Ability to send docs from one group to another—or to the toolkits (by simple tagging or simple “submit” feature)
Uploading
Ability to upload files to workrooms
Ability to submit a new file for consideration for a toolkit (not a file currently in any workroom)
OPTIONAL CAPABILITIES
Messaging
Opt-in notification of uploaded files or changes to existing files
Version Control
Ability to see who has the file checked out
External Access
Client access to certain documents
Within our website
Users gain access from our website
It looks like it resides on our website
Collaboration Tools
Team Calendar
Blog / Forum
Instant Chat
WebEx/Remote Presentation (for virtual team meeting)
Ratings
1-5 Star document rating (by user community)
Searching & Sorting documents by rating (best documents display first in search results)
Simultaneous Edit
Multiple people can edit the same document at same time
Workflow
Ability to tag a file to be reviewed by another user (ability to “escalate” a file for review by someone else)
Messaging alerts when a file has been flagged for a user
Most of the features that you mentioned above are available for free using Plone, which is an application that runs on top of Zope. I actually built and deployed an instance of Plone for a non-prof that had a lot of the features that mentioned above. They features might not have had the same names, but you get a lot of the same functionality.
Here's what my users really liked about Plone:
The ability to index the content of MS Office documents, so that people could search for documents based on content in addition to property and tags/keywords.
Usability. The default theme for Plone isn't the flashiest thing that you will ever see, but it's usability is excellent.
How easy it was the change the system and add new sites or functionality.
Here's what I liked about Plone:
Zero licensing costs. I was able to implement features that usually only come in very expensive systems for free. And I'm aware of these types of costs, because I administer FileNet systems for a living
It was very easy to install, upgrade, and administer. Please take that "pro" with a grain of salt if you're not a professional systems administrator :)
Overall, it was just very easy to work with.
And here are my cons:
If you need the web site to be accessible on the public internet, then your hosting costs may be higher-than-expected. It's definitely cheaper to set up a vanilla Joomla site than it is to set up a vanilla Plone site. Please note that you sound like you need a lot more than a vanilla content management system, so their may be no difference in hosting costs.
Plone is built on Zope, and Zope is an application server. It's easy to set up and use, but it works a little differently than a lot of other web and application servers. If you're used to administering a LAMP stack, then this will be different (but not necessarily bad).
One final con is true with all modern content management systems: don't give your users enough rope to hang themselves. When it take 2 minutes to a wiki and a blog to a web site, then users expect you to add new sites all of the time. Every new site adds a lot of administrative work to your plate, so try and get as much functionality as you can from each site that you add.
Hope that helps!
Tom Purl
Basecamp. Even if it doesn't have all the features you think you need, it does what it is supposed to (37Signals loves to rant about too many features, you aren't gonna need it (YAGNI), etc.)
Joomla is a pain. Activecollab is a poor clone of basecamp (unless it has changed drastically in the year or so that its been since I tried to use it to get out of paying for basecamp).
Present:
The product development is done in Visual Studio at the moment using .Net technologies, so it's important to stay in the same set of tools. Roles apart from developers are using spreadsheets, docs and diagramming tools, photoshop to do their work.
Future:
We want to build a workflow (a sequential process with roles, queues for action items, passing on info from one role to the other, approval etc) for a product development. The software product will be in enhancement stage forever, more the reason to establish this flow.
Typical users are designers, business analysts, content creators, developers, code reviewers, testers.
Let's say a new webpage needs to be developed. It will be,
thought about by the analyst in the
tool, will enter the information in
some format
a designer will use drag and drop to
build the page look, pass it over to
the
content creator, who will add
content(help text, hyperlinks, pure
text etc) to the page
a developer will check his queue to start
building logic around this page and
make it functional.
I am thinking about Visual Studio Isolated shell to be used as a tool framework mainly due to it's IDE capabilities et al, to build this. Has anyone worked on a similar set of requirements? Any patterns/solutions/ideas around how to go about this in the VS Shell paradigm?
Update: Visual Studio Team System is already being used by the developers and testers, but there is no customized workflow for them (& analysts, designers etc) available in TFS. Also Visual Studio is not the place for non-dev users that want to do things like, - define navigation flow, design the page elements etc.
Sounds exactly like Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.
I think there is a market for this product as I could not find anything close. There are disparate tools and products but no unified IDE like experience available and needs to be built on our own.
VS Isolated Shell 2010 is the starting point and platform on which this can be built. Needs several man months and may be years. However TFS ALM application lifecycle management has several overlaps of features with this idea, although not all, because it doesn't provide a customized experience per your custom workflow.
Jury is out, needs figuring out.