EA3. Now available in a shop near you

A fortnight has passed since the last release, so it was high time to get another release out with the latest set of fixes and enhancements. The EA3 release includes two big enhancements along with a collection of smaller fixes. The two big things are the addition of support for multiple PageFlow types and a much enhanced sandpit portlet.

Multiple PageFlow types

The support for multiple PageFlow types is actually among the biggest changes that we've seen to OpenQuote's functionality in quite a while - most of the changes in 2.0 so far have been about the new platform, but this is a real functional improvement.

When 2.0 is complete it will support Mid Term Adjustments (MTAs), Renewals, Cancellations, etc. in addition to the new business quotation that OpenQuote has always supported. Key to getting this to work is the ability of a product to support more than one PageFlow and that's exactly what EA3 includes.

Depending on how you want your product to work, it may be that its MTA quotation PageFlow and renewal PageFlow are very similar to its new business quotation - just with answers pre-populated with the answers given during the original quotation; or it may be that these PageFlows are very different. In all likelihood though there will be at least a few differences, this is where PageFlow inheritance comes into its own.

You can define the Renewal PageFlow, for example, to be the same as the new business one but with just one or two differences. There are still some new services to be added, but this step forward on its would have seemed to be worth making a new EA release, but there are the sandpit updates too...

Sandpit

The sandpit was overdue some attention. Its the place where product developers spend their time when they are developing and testing products, and the UI was rather basic in 1.4. Since the move to the 2.0 platform it had also taken on a couple of new and rather annoying bugs. A couple of screen shots:

A page form the IrishBrokerPI product viewed from the sandpit.

The all-new XML view. 

I'm very happy with the new XML view. Under 1.4 this was just a textarea, which doesn't offer a lot of help when editing XML. For 2.0 we're now using codemirror which does an excellent job of syntax highlighting even on the fly as you type.

WebDAV & Windows 7

This has to be the frustrating topic in the OpenQuote team this week. Product development in OpenQuote 2.0 relies heavily on WebDAV. Essentially, the product structure in CMS is exported to a file system on your machine where tools like Eclipse/Netbeans/IntelliJ/Notepad/Emacs/Vi (or practically any editor you like) can be used to edit products. 

Personally I use a Mac for all of my development work and, I'm not gonna make a big thing about it but, on a Mac WebDAV just works. On Windows 7 however it's a different story. We have had an inordinate amount of trouble! The internet is awash with comments and suggestions, but nothing seems very robust, practical or authoritative. The only option that we do have working is enabling digest authentication - which feels like something of a cop-out. 

There'll be more on this is a later post I'm sure!

Hot on the heels of 2.0EA1 comes...

Well, you probably guessed it: EA2. It's just under a month since EA1 was release and the number of changes that fell into the "that's really quite useful" category had reached a critical mass. Also, naturally, being an open source project we always aim to "release early, release often".

One thing that didn't make it into this release which I was hoping would is support for multiple PageFlow types. Quite a bit of preparatory work as been done, like splitting the pageflow source into a separate module, but there is still some midnight oil to be burned on this one. Particularly in the area of how this works in the sandpit. EA3 looks achievable though, and it will bring a whole new dimension to the product capability.

Things that did make it in that are worthy of a mention are the enablement of SSL. This has pretty obvious benefits, but it was primarily done to allow Liferay's WebDAV to work on Windows platforms. There will be more fixes for WebDAV in future releases because we still have the fairly major restriction of not being able to create files directly via WebDAV alone.

The OpenQuote theme has had a little attention to tidy up the login page and the use of font size - which were having the effect of making the tool pages look a little "Fisher Price - My First Product Development Kit". A couple of gratuitous screen shots:

We also included a very useful fix which stops product Registry.xml's from being corrupted. A timing issue between the document library listener hook and the product reset service lead to a very great deal of confusion. An update to a Registry.xml would apparently save correctly and kick of the necessary product reset, but on checking it you'd see different results depending on the technique you used to down load it. Sometimes you'd get the old version, sometimes the new version but truncated to the length of the old one! Just proves that development of async services is all about... timing.

The rest of the detail about what is in the release can be found, as always, on the release page. And should you want to play with EA2 you can download it from sourceforge.