Second Project Management Board in Bremen and further technical meeting
February 01-02, 2001
In February 2001, the project partners of INTELLECT work together to
establish the development and integration work of the softare plattform.
Therefore all partners came to Bremen for the Technical Meeting (TM) and
Projekt Management Board (PMB).
Projekt Management Board
BIBA showed a description of the component structure, types, categories,
models, attributes. Constraints, database write access, administrative module
are not yet implemented. BIBA will make available a testing client for the
integration task. Constraints will be ready middle of March. Input from
end-users was helpful. More input from the Austrian partners is needed.
Anecon presented order processing and help desk. Business process triggering
is technically ready, now models (flow charts) are requested, Anecon will
deliver a questionnaire. The help desk showed a customer online list and an
intense discussion of the help desk functionality with the end-users followed.
A difference was stated between B2B and B2C. The reconfirmation of the order
was seen as very important. No online back-office communication is available
because of the variance of the systems. A developers workshop will be held in
the middle of April. The details will be setup by Atlantide. Atlantide
presented a paper with the exact time schedule. All developers are told to
stick to the schedule.
The project plans a workshop and exhibition for November 2001. Concerning the
next SIG activities all information should go now to Atlantide. At the end of
May a clear plan will be established (what where when who). INTELLECT need a
clear understanding of the business plan and exploitation strategy. D06 is
scheduled end of March. Contents will be market analysis, business plan,
competitive advantages (in view of the American market). The "doc of 15th
October" will be the basis and the guideline of the commission (Uwe) will be
taken into account. OptiNet will organise clustering activities (Cawicoms,
E-Taylor, Fashion-Me).
Every developer should summarise the requirements on bandwidth and software
/ hardware provider space. Deliverable D13 will include a scenario definition
and a draft test plan. The first draft of D13 will be prepared at the
beginning of the pilot. The pilots will run from May to November:
- Pilot 1 in Greece; technical support by Interset
- Pilots 2 and 3 in Austria; technical support by Anceon
Open questions are: How many testers (pilot users) are available / required
and how much time / effort will the have to spend. The next review will take
place on June 7 in Brussels!
Technical Meeting
The morning session of the technical meeting started with one presentation
from each of the developer partners concerning the development status of each
of the modules. The following paragraphs summarise the results presented:
- The E-Shop module has been ported to use Java, XML and EJB to a great
extent by OptiNet. Work has been progressing mainly on the back-end and
has reached a level that offers all main functionality including database
access and handling of product and customer data.
- Atlantide has nearly completed support for the VRML/Java-3D front-end
functionality of the VR module. Work progresses on the layout of the
front-end and the presentation of the non VRML product information as
well as the integration of the module with the other parts of INTELLECT.
- Anecon also reported having reached an advanced level with the
Order processing and currently working on the integration of the
back-office systems as well as the 3rd party software like Microsofts
NetMeeting into the Helpdesk module.
- The Configurator (BIBA) has reached a stage where all product data is
handled as specified through an EJB network interface thereby
implementing a client server infrastructure. All data is being deposited
on an Oracle relational database accessed by the specified EJB server.
The Configurator bean already implements selection of suitable components
through the ComponentTypes and ComponentCategory structures.
The morning session was completed with a discussion of the development
progress, integration issues, various technical problems as well as design
decisions that have become necessary during the past months. The issues
discussed in depth during the rest of the session and the beginning of the
afternoon session where the following:
- BackOffice connectivity.
- Configuration Models
- Administrative Client
- Object Exchange
- Integration of modules and 3rd party software
- New technologies
BackOffice connectivity
Issues concerning the integration of the end-users back-office systems where
discussed. InterSet is currently using an SAP / accounting system and
suggested (for future development) an integration of a SAP system into
Intellect. This provoked a lengthy discussion concerning data exchange
issues. Data export and import on the basis of CSV files (comma separated
values) was explored as well as ways to get such files out of various
back-offices.
The solution proposed by Anecon was to achieve data exchange by avoiding
the high complexity of interfacing with SAP through the automated upload of
CSV files in regular intervals. A local client could be provided that gets
CSV files regularly generated by SAP and uploads them to the eShop via a
standardised protocol (i.e. FTP). Appropriate functionality server-side
would make sure that the content of these files is incorporated into the
database.
Configuration
Discussion on configuration issues was based on the first product/component
related input by the end-users (InterSet) and revolved mainly around the
following point:
- "Get all attributes" function for products: The need for a
function that supplies all the attributes of a given product was
identified by the eShop developers. This was accepted as a new feature to
be added into the Product model.
- Every component has its own price per retailer. Retailer IDs are
used to identify retailer: After a new rounf of discussions
concerning the functionality needed for price handling it was decided to
expand the product model to include Retailer Ids for every component and
to give each product a new price for each retailer ID. This will allow
for maximum flexibility for the end-users.
- Change componets / change recalculate price: The price of a
given product is the sum of the prices of its parts. Given that fact that
price should be displayed by the 3D module during configuration, price
related attributes of the product being configured should always be
up-to-date. It was thus decided that the Configurator should recalculate
the current price automatically with every component exchange.
- Optional Components in component packages: The needs for
optional components was identified by InterSet. Products up-till now were
specified as composed of a fixed list of component types. Removal of
components is not supported in the current product model in order to
prevent incomplete configurations from being produced (End-User
requirement). Optional components will be defined as an extra type of
component that is removable.
Administrative Client
Lack of progress in the area of the administrative client has been discussed
and attributed to the lack of a common source-base for the different
developer partners. Every developer partner was supposed to provide
appropriate administrative functionality for their own module. These
contributions were meant to be integrated on a common graphical client
possibly the 3D demonstration application of Atlantide. It turned out, that
Atlantide has relatively few interactions with the database (mostly limited
to URL handling for the VRML resources) and has thus not proceeded to develop
the envisaged client. A different solution was thus discussed and the
partners agreed on BIBA providing the test client ap-plication used to input
data into the Configurator database as a basis for the INTELLECT
administrative application. The other partners will use this client as a
basis and integrate their own functionality.
Object Exchange
The exchange of Java objects between the different INTELLECT modules is an
area of integration that has not been explored up till now and requires
further testing in order to gather needed experience. Great care has been
taken to design compatible or identical class models in order to facilitate
this exchange and first results reported by Anecon indicate that object
exchange over the network even through firewalls is rather uncomplicated.
The developers agreed that no special measures where needed and that all
needed work would take place during integration.
Integration of modules and 3rd party software
This discussion revealed that most partners do not feel that integration of
extra 3rd party software is necessary. 3rd party tools already discussed will
be integrated "module internally" and will thus be transparent to the rest of
INTELLECT. Atlantide presented a proposal for the organisation of the
integration phase that proposes a first complete integration of all
INTELLECT modules by the 19th of April.
Discussion of new technologies
XML was discussed in depth, in particular concerning bulk import of product
and configuration data. A further very promising application of XML would be
as a support tool for simpler development of administrative tools. XML
Editors programmed via an XML DTD could form the basis for a flexible
administrative environment. Further study is requires to decide whether
XML is of interest.
Software platform
The software platform for INTELLECT has been discussed once more and was
defined to consist of the following components:
|
Software
|
Product
|
Version
|
|
Servlet
Engine
|
Tomcat
|
4.x stable (3.2.1 until then)
|
|
EJB Server
|
EJBoss
|
2.1 stable
|
|
XML publishing framework
|
Cocoon
|
1.8 stable
|
|
Database
|
Oracle
|
8.1.6(7)
|
|
Database drivers
|
Oracle Java class
|
1.2
|
|
Integration Platform
|
Windows NT
|
4
|
|
|
|
Only for first integration. Switch over to newer versions (W2K) after that.
|
Next technical Meeting/Developer Workshop
BIBA and OptiNet are developing the two modules with the most interaction and
interdependence. It is therefore desirable for the aforementioned partners to
use the close proximity of their sites in order to facilitate communication
through a large number of small meetings.
The developers decided that no new technical meeting will be needed before
the end of the integration phase. Smaller problems or questions that may
arise during that time will be resolved using on-line communication. It has
been proposed to start using tools like Internet-telephony, Videoconferencing
and ICQ as a means of more direct communication.
Conclusions
The development results are one month behind the milestones of the project.
That has several different reason, because of the changing from OptiNet to
WWL and versa visa. Additionally the project has been involved new people/
employees from different partners, which need time to work efficiency in the
project. Several technical problems arised also, as software bugs, plattform
problems, third party products, or not runable new versions. This problems
are the reason, why the project has been lost one month in the time table.
But otherwise, this problems are normal and the consortium is strong enough
and has experiences to solve the problems and finish the work of the modules
for an efficient integration meeting in April.