Over the last few months a lot of what I've had to do has come from combining frameworks. Usually one of those frameworks is Vaadin. But whenever you're combining frameworks of any kind, it usually means some content is pre-configured, which may conflict with settings in another framework. If you're not familiar with the framework and the technologies in use, it's a lot like looking at hieroglyphics without a Rosetta Stone! The result is a lot of learning on the job.
Earlier this week I had problems with high CPU utilisation and had to restart my PC. I took the opportunity to bite the bullet and install some Windows Updates. What I saw brought my mind back to UX and coding of applications. For at least five minutes, the progress displayed as "100% Complete". It prompted me to issue the following tweets:
Developers, progress bar should never show 100% complete. It should be 0% of next process or gone. Windows updates 100% complete for minutes
I've been involved in developing training materials, tutorials, videos, online documentation and even books. So I've gained a full appreciation of the effort involved in not only creating good documentation but maintaining it too. Rene Winkelmeyer wrote a good blog post today about developer experience and his points are very valid.
Over the last couple of years I've seen a number of approaches as I've dug into a variety of new technologies.
Since earlier this year when I started trying to get a better handle on the breadth of graph database options available for a developer, Titan has been an option I have kept in regular contact with. It's fair to say there has been a lot of uncertainty about the prospects for Titan. But there have been some interesting developments regarding Titan during the summer. IBM Graph has reached GA on Bluemix, albeit with only REST access, which may not appeal to Java developers, particularly those familiar with Titan and comfortable with natively handling vertices and edges. And more recently there has been a lot of work on integrating Titan with ScyllaDb, which provides a long-term option for using Thrift as a communication mechanism between Titan and the backend database.
The bulk of my experience with application development has been building workflow-related rich client and web applications on NoSQL databases, typically IBM Domino. The challenge in the Notes Client was to provide dashboard-style displays and a good way to display documents for action by the current individual. Private views can be used, but impact database performance. So, typically, the approach is to display views that present a scrollable table of data. Domino's document-level reader security is then used to ensure only the appropriate data is visible. If data is archived appropriately, performance of the database is good enough for many reasonably-sized applications. (Of course, archiving is often omitted from scope of the first phase for the rapidly-developed application, and becomes a case of "out of sight, out of mind".) But with the increasing prevalence of web applications replacing Notes Client applications, the ability to display "my documents" and use structured searches to display a targeted subset of documents was much easier.