Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

We are loving CakePHP, but it takes some time to adapt it to what we want. It took up through this week for Henry to finish the authorization and authentication mechanism and it may be two weeks more before German is done with the core of the Web Subsystem.

What about me? On my last post I mentioned I would try to complete the documentation of the first phase of the Sinatrra Scope by Sunday. Well, I… hmmm…. ehem…. haven’t finished yet. (Sorrryyyyy) But I am delighted to report that I am probably 90% through it. If everything goes well, I will be done by Sunday. The reason for the delay has been caused by the high level of abstraction we are trying to achieve. It took me one full week just to come up with the objects and attributes of the domain model of Sinatrra. This is probably why No one has attempted or been successful with anything like Merrcury before….. But we will prevail !!!!

Alex

Thanks to the fact that we decided to use CakePHP instead of Perl, we will be able to start working in some of the subsystems several weeks before I originally scheduled. That is great news! The only problem is that I now have to run to complete many use cases and user interface requirements or run the risk of having a great team of developers doing nothing!

I have been trying to work on the documentation of the Sinatrra scope for several days already and I hadn’t been able to get inspired. Sinatra is supposed to be one of the most important and innovative subsystems of the Merrcury Engine. Fortunately, TGIGF! Almost everybody, with the exception of Maestro, took the day off. The silence allowed me to hear the muses! I think I finally have a good idea of how Sinatrra will work and I am very happy with the abstraction I currently have on my mind. Tomorrow and Sunday I will try to complete the documentation of the first phase of said subsystem.

Also, today Maestro completed the wireframes and HTML of the Hendrrix and Morrison subsystems!

It was a very good Friday, indeed.

Alex

Germán today finished documenting and working on the core of the CakePHP engine so that we can properly use web services in all the subsystems to communicate with each other. We are one step closer of implementing for the first time in our projects a 100% service oriented architecture!

Alex

The requirements for the Morrison subsystems have been completed by Lucho.

The development environment, including repositories and publication tools, has been altered by Henry to work with CakePHP. Lucho also worked on helping us set up the local environments of CakePHP. We are now ready to start coding on the new framework. Hurrah!

Alex

Germán and Lucho started to work on the project today! Welcome guys!

Four hours into their first day of work, we had the most vivid, yet most useless discussion of the project how far: Whether we should use names of musicians to name the subsystems of the Merrcury Engine. The answer after one hour of arguments: “Yes”. I look forward to see vivid discussions like this, but hopefully on more interesting topics!

By the end of the day three subsystems had been named already: Morrison for the Email Management Subsytem, Hendrrix for the Account Management Subsystem, and Sinatrra for the I-can’t-tell-you-just-yet Subsystem.

Alex

Today Lucho accepted the offer of joining our team! Two minutes after he was questioning the use of Perl in the project. What a way of starting!

Two weeks ago we had agreed that the new architecture we wanted would not allow us to import code from other applications we had developed in Perl. As a consequence, we determined that would have to code from scratch pretty much everything. We never thought out of the box, though: we had selected Perl just because we would use existing code. It didn’t make sense any longer.

Today we all agreed that the best bet would be CakePHP. We also concluded that all the work Henry had done during the past two weeks rewriting a framework in Perl was great, but still many years away from reaching most of the capabilities that CakePHP already includes. Sorry Henry, we luv ya!

Thank you Lucho and Germán for the demo! CakePHP looks impressive.

Alex

We really don’t need a logo until we release the first public version of the project, but we just couldn’t wait to have one. As such we worked over the weekend and decided on one of the many options that Maestro offered us. You can now see it in the header of this blog

Alex

Germán (his name, not nationality) agreed on joining the team! Germán will start working on the project next month. Not only he is a great web developer, but he also introduced me to the world of use cases. User stories are soooooo old century. Thank you Germán!

Alex