This is the first item in what I hope to become a series covering one of the largest systems I've ever been involved in building. A full year has passed since it was put into production so now I can give a level of detail which wasn't possible before. Yes, this is all written after the fact which gives insight not available at the time... oh well.

Alright, the first thing you need with any new system is a set of requirements. Some people want to skip this step and dive directly into the design or even coding but hopefully those people will be tied up and left in a closet by themselves somewhere. Just like you can't buy plane tickets without a destination, you can start system design or implementation without a destination. So here we go...

After the success of the Microsoft Project Importer and a number of requests from interested people, we have up for sponsorship the Project Exporter. This has been a module that I've been looking forward to for quite a while and will finally close the loop between the two systems.

A formal specification is still under development but it is established that this will export an XML structure compatible with Microsoft Project 2000 and above and will include all of the relevant fields and data which are captured by dotProject. The entire Import -> edit -> Export process will be used to validate that all information is carried through appropriately. The intent is to make the transition so painless that users can use each system for its strengths.

For any who are/aren't interested, I have finalized my conference schedule for the rest of the year.

First, I will be speaking at the DC PHP conference on REST Web Services. I'm working on a Secret Project(tm) with REST right now and it seemed quite fitting. IThe conference runs 19-20 October right here in Washington, DC just 30 days from now. It should be an exciting time as some of the other speakers are Rasmus Lerdorf aka creator of PHP, Chris Shiflett the PHP security guy, and Elliott White III who runs some little website.

Adaptivepath's article about Ajax has been flying through the blogosphere like wildfire over the past couple of weeks. I'm not linking to it here because it's #2 when searching for "Ajax" on Google.

It essentially calls for a series of small interactions with a web server that happen seemlessly while the user is working with the page. This minimizes the the roundtrip problems that normally happen when working with large forms and large datasets. It also minimizes the waiting time for the end user. The reason this concept has gotten so many electrons lately is because of the elegant implementation by Google for Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps - each of which is impressive in its own right.