Many organizations want the benefits of both a web based Forum and a email based Mailing List. It is easy to get this with OpenACS because OpenACS Forums have built in notifications and a "Reply by Email" functionality for instant notifications.

This tutorial guides you in setting up "reply by email" for the forums package. The forums package will email an article to users who are subscribed to notifications. The "reply by email" feature allows recipients of the notification to reply to the forum post by email.

The system is configured to receive the email and post the reply to the appropriate forum article. 1

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A talk by Stephen Taylor describes the differences between traditional, engineering based, software projects, and agile software projects. The analogies are very enlightening. The engineering model is compared to building a bridge. There are two main phases, design, and construction. After construction begins it is expensive if not impossible to change. Software is not like that at all. Specifications and requirements always emerge during the development process and change is inevitable in software projects. If we break up programming into two phases, the design phase continues until the moment the software is delivered. Construction, otherwise known as compilation, is cheap, and can by done a limitless number of times whenever the design changes. This leaves us with the ability to engage the users of the software directly, and collaborate with them to produce the final product. Frequent delivery of finished features provides for constant feedback, and hopefully allows the final product to better meet the users business needs. In the talk, they go even a step farther than most Agile projects. The users actually sit down with the programmer, "break" the problem, or demonstrate the behavior they need changed, and the programmer makes the changes right then, with direct collaboration between the end user of the software and the programmer who can make the changes. The speaker says

From this you can see we have collapsed the stages of analysis, specification, design, coding and testing into a short, uninterrupted dialogue with our user. Communication is high-bandwidth, face to face; feedback is rich and immediate.

The idea of uninterrupted dialogue with the user sounds like the ideal situation, and isn't possible in all projects, but striving towards that goal will improve the results of any software project.

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Draggable Portlets (part 1)

Overview

This is the third installment of a series of tutorials about Solution Grove's Web 2.0 Demo Page. In this tutorial I show you how to make elements, like the portlets in our demo, draggable, specifically the "Add Stuff" and "Map" portlets.

Prerequisites

The usual prerequisites apply. If you've tried the first two tutorials you should probably have an OpenACS instance running with Ajax Helper installed.

HTML Element

We start by creating html elements that users of your web application can drag. In the case of the demo page we used div elements with CSS styles. The css styles define the background color, width, height and other attributes of the div element. Here's what a draggable portlet looks like.

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Ajax Connections

Overview

The first tutorial in this series introduces you to the Ajax Helper package and how to implement simple cinematic effects. The second tutorial in this series will show you how to make ajax requests to update sections of an html page without refreshing an entire page.

If you're wondering how a portlet can be inserted into the the mashups demo page without refreshing the entire page, this tutorial is for you.

Prerequisites

Prerequisites for this tutorial are the same as the first. Please make sure you have Ajax Helper installed on your OpenACS instance. The installation should also mount ajax helper in /ajax. Also ensure that you have sourced the needed javascript libraries. Please consult the first tutorial on how to source javascript libraries.

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Using Cinematic Effects on your Web Applications

Overview

This is the first in a series of tutorials from my experience building Solution Grove's Web 2.0 Demo.

I'll start easy by showing you how to use the Ajax Helper Package to add neat effects to your OpenACS applications. The Ajax Helper package is a helper package that hopes to make it easy for OpenACS developers to incorporate Ajax and other javascript effects to OpenACS web applications

If you're wondering how the portlets disppaer and appear in our mashups demo, you'll find out in this tutorial.

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We are very excited about the new functionality just announced by Nick Carroll of the University of Sydney. Nick is also the author of dotFOLIO

Screen shots: http://ca.rroll.net/?cat=3

The Announcement:
Curriculum Central is a system for managing outlines for Courses or Units of Study. The system is targeted at academics that have to revise their course outlines before a course can be offered. Quality assurance is built into the workflow process, which requires approval from a department or school coordinator before the information is published for students to read.

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