Snippets

Snippets of web application development

Simon Bisson thinks about how you should put together an effective web application development team, before taking a look at a new project management tool from Microsoft and the first new browser from Netscape since it launched Mozilla.

Developing your Internet development team

No matter how we design our web applications there are two areas that are of vital importance in creating a service that is reliable and easy to use. There’s no point in developing the most sophisticated and reliable distributed application if there’s no way or users to navigate around the resulting site, or if the underlying hardware and network architecture are unsuitable for the business they’re intended to support.

Of course this philosophy doesn’t just affect the design of the application - it also affects the composition of your development team. Internet application development needs to a multi-disciplinary approach, with integrated teams of front-end HTML designers, developers, systems architects, network engineers and business analysts. The first four roles will be familiar to any developer, but why include business consultants in an application development team? Any line of business web application will have a major impact on the business model of the organisation implementing it - so the development of any application will include reorganisation, or (in the case of a dot com) the implementation of a completely new business model.

Working hand in hand with business consultants may seem anathema to the hardened developer, but the cross-fertilisation can lead to interesting results. Technologists can keep the wildest fancies of the business models in line, whilst an ambitious business plan can lead to the creation of new application models and advanced system architectures. Application development is a creative process, and the value of the input from team members outside the development process is often underestimated.

Working with designers and other creative members of the team is also important. If an application is to deliver content, the technologists will need to work closely with the creative team, both in understanding the limitations of the technologies being used and in developing the techniques needed to deliver a compelling user experience. In the case of a large site the creative team will include information architects, whose role will encompass the structure and flow of an application. They may also be required to help define the database schema that will be used to store the content delivered by your application - as well as working to define the granularity of the information that a modern internet application needs to deliver to a wide range of devices, from WAP phones to the latest multimedia PCs.

One essential for a multi-disciplinary team is a good project manager. Teams from many different disciplines can be difficult to control - when they work well, they give superb results, but when they have problems, they can be a nightmare, both for team members and the client. A project manager will need to be able to control the stresses and the strains within the team, guiding it towards its goals.

Project management tools go to the web

Controlling a large project can be a complex procedure, and the larger the team, the more difficult it becomes. After a while pieces of paper and spreadsheets just don't work any more - and you're going to need something a bit more powerful. One option is to use project management software.

Microsoft has just launched a new version of its project management tool, Project 2000. Web development teams will find it a useful team management tool, as it now includes Project Central - a web-based project management tool for your intranet, moving from an email-driven workflow system to a web-based community. This is intended to turn your project management tools from a desktop tool into an overall part of your knowledge management solution.

At the recent launch event the Microsoft group marketing manager for Project, Bob Crissman, described the targets that were set for the development of Project 2000. These goals included providing tools for team productivity, developing means of increasing the usefulness of data for users, and extending project management across the entire enterprise. The process used in defining these included working with Project users and users of competing platforms, as well as working with users who ran projects without the benefit of project management tools.

With developing trends in the IT industry moving away from monolithic application development to web and other distributed applications, as well as to ERP systems and other large scale enterprise applications, the typical user of a project management tool is no longer the project manager. This lead to a list of user requirements that Project 2000 needed to address:

Project needed to get away from its single user heritage.
It needed to be able to track not just time, but also budget, and goals.
It needed improved analysis tools.
There was a requirement for high-level project information to be made available, so that an organisation’s CEO and CFO can understand what is going on in a project, delivering snapshots showing the state of a project.
Project also needed to scale to handle the requirements of large infrastructure and engineering projects.

Project 2000 is no longer a stand-alone application, as it is tightly linked to a web application, Project Central. A set of COM objects and ASP scripts running on Internet Information Server 4 or better, Project Central is an intranet or extranet project management application, which gives you a subset of the facilities of the full Project application, mainly reporting tools. It also includes a series of ActiveX controls that need to be installed in a browser to be used - so currently it's only suitable for use with Microsoft's own web browsers. A single user licence for Project Central is included in every copy of Project 2000, and web access only licences are also available.

If you've been using Office 2000 you'll find Project 2000 easy to use, as its user interface is closely related to Word and Excel - and so the learning curve will be quite short. As it uses the HTML help you're also able to extend the help system to include your own project management methodology. You can also customise Project 2000 by using project templates. Whilst Microsoft provides templates for most basic project types, you can create your own for how your organisation works. You also won’t have any trouble upgrading from Project 98, as the main interface and operations remain very much the same. However, it is the new features that will make upgrading desirable for web application development teams.

One key change is the ability to set a priority level for each task, with a priority scale that now goes from 1 to 1000. If you're trying to level resources across multiple projects, this can be used as a tool to handle prioritisation and utilisation for your team. You're also able to give task durations confidence levels, and these are shown on the main progress charts.

It's also possible to define the number of days in a month. You'll need to do this if your working on international projects, as 6-day weeks can be taken into account in your project planning. You can also set up specific task calendars for individuals and for organisations involved in your projects, so you can take account of how your customers work when planning their input in your project.

In any project, the key issue is the availability of resources - both people and materials. With project 2000 you are able to manage both of these, adding the ability to show critical material deliveries and the like in your project plans. It's even possible to take into account the costs of the materials. For staff that may need to work on other projects you can create resource profiles. These allow you to show individual availability and take it into account in planning, where one staff member may be able to work full time for 3 weeks, 50% for 1 week, and 10% for 1 month...

Like Project 98, Project 2000 is a workflow management tool as well as a planner. You can use it to assign tasks to resources and then deliver their assignments via email or Project Central. Three simple tools allow Project 2000 to communicate with your team members. TeamAssign and TeamUpdate will assign tasks, whilst TeamStatus will help you pull in time sheet information. You're also able to link into your Outlook address books. The Workgroup option (Options/Workgroup from the Tools menu) will help you choose how you communicate with your team.

If you choose the web server option, then Project 2000 will use Project Central as its main communication tool. If you do this, it's a good idea to make sure hyperlinks are emailed to your team, so they don't forget to check their Project Central areas. Of course, as Project Central is a web application, you can include it in custom Outlook "digital dashboards". The Project Central web application is designed to work on Windows NT and 2000 web servers running IIS4.0 and IIS5.0. It is an ASP application, and only works with Internet Explorer, as it uses ActiveX grid and calendar controls in its displays. At this stage there's no integration with the Windows 2000 Active Directory, so you'll need to manually create any users. Accounts can be created when messages are sent or when tasks are delegated. There's no specific security tool for Project Central, so you'll find it uses Windows's own security tools.

If you're using Microsoft Exchange as a corporate mail standard, then you're able to use Project 2000 and Project Central in conjunction with Outlook. Initially, mail will be sent to Outlook users to encourage them log on to Project Central. However, much tighter integration is possible. You can import your Outlook tasks into the Project Central task view, and it's even possible to replace the Outlook task view with a Project Central view. Another function allows you to combine Calendar information from both Project and Outlook.

Reporting is a key feature of any project management tool, and Project 2000 is no exception. You can use both Project 2000 and Project Central to integrate multiple documents to create reports. An automated merge tool will link reports from users and resources. If you just want a quick overview of a project's progress, visual indicators will show task status - using easily interpreted red, yellow and green lights.

Whilst Project 2000 and Project Central may be part of Microsoft’s knowledge management vision, which is more closely related to the concept of management information systems than open knowledge sharing, it’s still a useful tool to have around. A simple means of distributing reports around a project team (especially when a project manager is working on several closely related projects) is very important, and Project 2000’s Project Central is well worth examining - if you’re working with NT or Windows 2000.

Netscape 6 PR1

It's been a long time since we've seen anything new from Netscape. Its web servers are now part of Sun's iPlanet range, and the NetCenter portal has become part of Steve Case's ever growing AOL empire. The Netscape browser had been handed over to the Mozilla open source development team, and version 4 seemed destined to receive only bug fixes and minor updates. Mozilla was turning out build after build of their new browser, but it was really only of interest to the folk who hang around web sites like Slashdot or BetaNews - with code that was barely alpha quality, and often very unstable.

It looked as though Internet Explorer had finally won the browser wars. Then came a phone call: "Would you like to come to the UK launch of Netscape 6?" The first preview release of Netscape's next generation browser was about to be unveiled. A complete rewrite, and based on the results of the Mozilla open source development product, Netscape 6 is intended to be the browser that could knock Internet Explorer from the top of the tree (if the US Department of Justice doesn't get there first...). Designed to be cross platform and extensible, Netscape 6 is promising a lot.

The preview release breaks the usual model of application development, simultaneously released for the three most common desktop operating systems - Linux, MacOS and Windows. Thanks to a new ADSL line into my home test network, it was a matter of just a few minutes to download and install copies on to all three to see how well it performed. Installation is easy enough for Windows and MacOS users. Using the same model as Apple's QuickTime or Microsoft's Internet Explorer, all you need to do is download a 500K installer. This then connects to the Netscape's FTP site and downloads the components you choose. You can select a full install (with the essential debugging tools), or you can drop Mail, News and the Composer HTML editor for just a pure browser. Things aren’t so easy for the Linux user. You’ll need to download a tarball of the full application, and then install it yourself - with no instructions at all. We'd have expected an RPM at the very least these days.

All three versions have a similar look and feel, with Netscape skins (or as Mozilla calls them: “chromes”). Unlike the latest Mozilla builds, Netscape 6 PR1 is not user skinable, though the underlying XUL interface description technology is in place - so you can't use any of the chromes available from the Mozilla web site. The Netscape user interface is easy enough to use - closer to Opera than any other browser - with large buttons for the main browsing functions, as well as an extra few pixels of screen real estate for the rendering engine. Netscape calls instant messaging the Internet's third killer application, and you'll find that AOL's Instant Messenger is built into PR1. Netscape’s mail tool has also been integrated with AIM, so you can send an instant message as a reply to an email, as long as your contact is on line.

Probably the most innovative feature of Netscape 6 is the sidebar. Here you’ll find news (from CNN and NetCenter) and stock information, as well as a persistent search pane - which uses Netscape's own Open Directory service. Netscape has integrated AOL’s instant messaging technology into the browser, and the side bar replaces the AIM buddy list. Third parties will be able to create new sidebars for Netscape 6, so you could find your favourite eBay auctions as a pane or the home page of a company intranet. You'll find instructions for creating sidebars for your sites and web applications on the Netscape web site. One of the most innovative sidebars shown at the launch allowed you to see live video from childcare facilities.

The most important part of Netscape 6 for the web application developer is the new Gecko rendering engine. This is designed to be standards compliant, supporting HTML 4.0, XML (and XSL and XSLT), the W3C DOM levels 0 and 1, as well as CSS level 1. It’s also ready for use in other applications. Gecko is designed as a reusable component - and is very small. At the UK launch Netscape announced that Gecko was going to be used for the AOL Anywhere Internet appliances from Gateway, as well as in Liberate’s interactive TV set top boxes.

Of course this is only the first public preview of a browser that won’t be released for another 6 months. It looks as though Netscape should have kept their browser inside Mozilla for a little while longer, as there are a lot of extremely rough edges still showing - and PR1 can at best be described as alpha. From a first look like this at an unstable, and slow, piece of code, it’s far too early to say whether Netscape 6 will allow AOL to reclaim the crown Netscape lost to Microsoft.

Summary

Web development teams need to be complex cross-disciplinary teams.

Suitable project management tools are required to run such a team.
Microsoft Project 2000 offers an Intranet project management environment.
Netscape has released PR1 of its next browser, for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Netscape 6 is designed to comply with W3C standards.