Has anyone had experience with developing web apps using ClearQuest? Looking at the features, it mentions process automation but I'm not sure how large of a process/application it can support. Our group gave up a small section of a larger application to another group that used ClearQuest to web-enabled the process but now the ClearQuest tools are being pushed on us to web-enable the entire application. I have a ASP.NET background but ClearQuest is very wizard like and the only code that I've seen is called "BASIC" and it looks a lot like VBScript.
Clearcase/Clearquest has decent integration with Rational Applicaiton Developer. I am not sure if you arsking about its strenghts or actually exposing ClearQuest to the web. You can do the obligatory and lame activity of writing CGI/PERL scripts to expose some of the features to the web. You can use perl or VBScript to write CC/CQ hooks. It has its own perl build included in the product called ratperl. It has fantastic command line support but it comes at a price of complexity. CC/CQ is very powerful provided you think about the implementation in your organization very carefully. It can support very powerful work flows and is highly customizable.
There are several APIs which allow you to do what you want, write a WebApp.
CQWeb itself is built using the CM API, which allows a Java application (web or non-web) to be build. A tutorial is here:
http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSSH5A_9.0.0/com.ibm.rational.team_api_cq_tut.doc/topics/teamapi_cq_abstract.htm
You could implement a basic web application using perl-CGI, since CQ has a Perl API.
You can write an ASP/C# web application because ClearQuest has a OLE (Visual Basic) API. The original ClearQuest Web application was built using the Visual Basic API
So the answer is yes, it is possible.
Wouldn't it be nice it supported a JavaScript API? Then we could write nodeJS CQ applications.
Sure it's possible, for a VS style integration I would either wrap the cqole.dll or use the OSLC connectors to get access to the RESTful interface. While the cqole is the C++ API and it is not officially supported this will suite you better than trying to implement this with the VBScript API. If you are more comfortable with just using the web services I would check out jazz.net where the wiki explains the bridge in gory details.
You dont exactly develop webapp with ClearQuest, CQ is only a process automation tool that build on logic and state transitions, and the interactions are scripted in either VBScript or Perl.
However do note that it has always been a pain to manage CQ codes as the "Designer" itself is a completely broken tool. It supports version tracking but doesnt tell u the difference between versions. The built-in code editor doesnt have syntax highligting, and it doesnt support parallel development. I can go on and on.
In the later versions, (version 7 onwards I supposed), CQ comes with eclipse based client AND designer tools, which supposedly enhance the whole experience. But I dont have too much experience with it to comment.
As for the web component, it runs on the websphere layer and simply is a application/presentation layer for users to access CQ through a HTTP protocol. It has 90% of the features of a full CQ client, and is usually easier to maintain and deploy to a wide user group.
Check out http://open-services.net/ for information on development using Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration.
Related
I'm currently in an internship and i have to create a whole BI application.
I think i'll use pentaho, and I have to use just open source component.
I know that Pentaho Analyzer is not free
My question is: Is saiku an equivalent of analyzer?
If yes, can I use it with pentaho instead of analyzer?
thks
I'm the developer of Pivot4J project and want to share my (subjective) opinion on the subject.
First, as though you righteously assumed Pivot4J to be more of an API than an application, it does not always mean you need to write lot of code to use it.
We also have a Pentaho BI plugin which does not require any coding and has comparable features to Saiku plugin, though it's targeted toward the yet unreleased Pentaho 5.0 platform.
And our sample application provides most of the functionalities that JPivot web application has, even though it lacks a data source configuration feature which will be soon to be fixed.
Compared to Saiku, I think each project has its own advantage in different scenarios.
Saiku has a much lightweight architecture on the client side than our sample application and the plugin, so it can be deployed and embedded virtually anywhere.
While it's not much difficult to create a full REST style analytic application with Pivot4J, our current sample and plugin applications require at least a Servlet container to run and are more difficult to be embeded than Saiku in certain environment.
On the other hand, as Pivot4J is designed to be UI independent API from the start, it could provide more flexibility than Saiku in my opinion to developers when they want to build their own application on top of it, or intend to customize core behaviors of the API.
For example, if you want to use Pivot4J with your own application which is build with ExtJS, DhtmlX, or any other UI toolkits, it'd be much easier to achieve a seamless integration with Pivot4J, as it provides you with convenient abstract extension points to do that.
Finally, if you're familiar with Javascript you might find working with Saiku easier as it delegates most of the UI related works to the client side.
On the other hand, if you're an old school Java developer like me :) you might find our sample application to be easier to understand and work with, as there's virtually no custom script involved and everything is done on the server side with JSF component model.
To conclude, I'd like to say that Pivot4J is not just an API which cannot be used without writing much codes as it already includes quite feature complete Pentaho BI plugin for the upcoming 5.0 release of the platform. And as Pivot4J and Saiku take rather different approach from each other, each has its own strength and advantage which could be leveraged to suit the specific use case.
Yes of course. Both the tools use the same underlying OLAP engine - Mondrian. Saiku is essentially the same as analyzer providing many of the same features - however it has a different architecture which additionally makes it very embeddable and pluggable. Plus Saiku can be used standalone too if you want to.
Check out the demo at dev.analytical-labs.com to see what it can do.
Also for help you wont find many tools with such a great community - hook up with them on Freenode IRC at either ##Pentaho or ##Saiku depending on your questions!
Pentaho is the right choice for OS BI too - Presume you looked at Jaspersoft as well? Worth a look but you'll no doubt realise the features are better in Pentaho.
Have you think about a pure javascript UI to pivot your olap cubes? There is one such component calls WebPivotTable at http://webpivottable.com
Jpivot, saiku and pentaho are all based on olap4j API so that they all need a java server side service. WebPivotTable use AJAX call to xmla service directly so that it can be used to pivot any xmla OLAP server, like mondrian, SSAS, iccube. Since it doesn't tie up with any java back end and also it is pure javascript based, you can easily integrate it into any website or web application.
I am looking for a solution to simulate vxml application in a desktop/web browser.
Challenge
i have few hundreds of unit test cases in every new vxml application development.
it is not possible to always make a test call to test every single unit test cases i have. if i can test vxml application in a simulator it will be more easy to test it..
i am aware of that avaya Dialog designer/AAOD have a feature to test application in their inbuild Application simulator which comes with AAOD/DD Eclipse package but this tool can run AAOD/DD projects in workspace alone.
Please refer : Chapter 16 in Avaya dev guide
AAOD's Tool looks like this
is it possible to customize to use this tool to simulate static VXML / Nuance NDF based VXML application ?
or any other tools available ?
Unit testing of IVR applications is challenging and it is near impossible to hit ever possible path in the call flow for an application of any size. I am not aware if you can customize Avaya's tool for your needs. But there is a product out there that may fit some of your requirements. It is Voiyager by Syntellect. It looks like they have a free trial now if you want to try it out. I saw a demonstration of it at SpeechTEK a few years ago and it was pretty impressive. The only reason I did not pursue it at the time is that it was pretty pricey.
Avaya od/dd is a platform dependent tool(IDE) where you can create (vxml+java), test and debug application in the tool. But code which is created outside(Avaya OD/DD tool) the environment is not possible. Because code generated in avaya OD is java format, while executing in the voice browser it is converted into vxml for that u need to give webLM a license to avaya tool.You can use some ivr automation tools like hammer etc.But you need to pay for the software.
VXML apps are just WARs. The only session information transferred between invocations of pages is the session id. We have used Apache JMeter to create apps.
What you can do it try and see if what you want to do can be done via the web browser, by going to http://<server>/<Application/Start there fill the boxes you require (most of the time just filling the ones marked ANI and DNIS will be enough). If your call can be tested this way you can use the tools for web testing, without using Orchestration Designer.
If your app has a CTI/AES connector you may not be able to do this, because the web server tries to connect to AES upon submitting the first page.
As stated above , there are things that cannot be unit tested .
Nuance NDF and SVF applications come with test pages where you can simulate the call flow ; similar tools exit for grammars .
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.
I am mainly interested in the 'integration features' between the IDE and the application server.
One example would be GUI editors for various server specific deployment descriptors.
Another example, from the NetBeans IDE integration with GlassFish, is the ability to:
edit a java file that is part of a
web application,
save the file and
see the effect of the change that you
just saved in the browser (without a
bunch of reloading).
Please include a link to any reference to the feature in user docs, if you have it at the tips of your fingers.
Over my years using RAD, the feature I'd recommend everybody to use would be its uninstaller...
Seriously though, RAD's advantage used to be IBM's plugins for Web / J2EE development; over the years, though, the Eclipse community has been making great progress with WTP and JST, so for most J2EE development you should do fine using Eclipse+WTP+JST... which are free (comparing RAD with 5-10K USD licensing fees. Per machine, that is).
One person suggested that the 'Web site navigation' tooling was useful.
I'm a junior VB.net developer with little application design knowledge. I've been reading a lot of material online regarding different design patterns, frameworks, and methodologies. It's become a bit confusing for me.
Right now I'm trying to decide on what language would be best suited to convert an existing VB6 application (with SQL server backend.) I need to update the UI and add more user functionality and reporting capabilities. Initially I was thinking of using WPF and attempting the MVVM model for this big project. Reports would be generated from SSRS.
A peer suggested using ASP.net and I don't have enough experience to determine what would be better. The senior programmers here are stuck on using VB6 and don't have any input on what to use. They are encouraging me to use the latest technologies.
This application would be for ~20 users in a central location. Ideally I would stick to a Microsoft .net language. Current interface is similar to a datagrid table where the user would click in to see the detail of each record. They would need to have multiple records open at any given time.
I look forward to all the advice I can get.
EDIT 2010/04/22 2:47 PM EST
What is your audience? Internal clients within an intranet
How complex are the interactions you expect to implement? not very... displaying data from SQL server to UI. Allow user updates to said data. Typically just one user modifying a record.
Do you require near real-time data updates? no
How often do you expect to update the application after the first release? twice/year
Do you expect a well-defined set of client platforms? Yes, windows xp environment, potentially upgrading to Win7. Currently in IE.6 moving to IE7 or 8 within a couple of months.
Do users need access from anywhere? No, just from their PC.
What would be wrong about building a simple ASP.Net application in VB.Net using Gridviews for allowing the data access and manipulation? Seems like a simple ADO.Net trial application if you aren't familiar with it in the beginning you will be by the end. CRUD applications are pretty common so it shouldn't be too hard to build it and then refine it as more requirements become apparent.
Sounds like you need to use a web-based solution--this eliminates alot of your potential distribution woes with multiple users. You could use silverlight, but if you are locked into SSRS, this might not be the way to go.