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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Enabling better communication
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Years ago, the Smalltalk development team used a tool called Scopus (long since chewed up by Siebel) for bug tracking. Engineering was never happy with that, and built a homebrew system called MARS (Minimal Action Request System). It was first deployed back around 1995, right after VisualWave was developed - as a web application. This was nifty - it was easily accessible to any of the development staff that needed to get to the bug system, and ran in any browser. The only problem was speed - things like Query By Example were none too speedy when the steps included:
Send the query
Server processes the query
Client browser has to render the query results
For a long time, we just put up with this. Then a few months ago, I hacked together a simple UI client that hit the back end (query by AR number only) via a servlet. Interestingly, getting results displayed outside a browser was much, much simpler. I integrated the simple client tool as an internal plugin for BottomFeeder. A couple of our engineers ran with this idea, and started working on a more capable client using Opentalk - our Smalltalk-Smalltalk distribution framework. Now, using an ssh tunnel or VPN connection, any of the internal users can query and update the system much more easily.
This is interesting because it represents a move away from a browser based interface and over to a smart client - back to the future, as it were. Using this approach, using the bug tool is far less painful, because the roundtrip communication with the server is so much faster. MS is moving this way in LongHorn; I wonder how many other people are doing similar things?
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