www.plat-forms.org Web programming competition

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www.plat-forms.org Web programming competition

• report from the Geneva team
• together since oct. 2006 to build the new
  business application for Geneva Justice

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How?

• 9 Teams of 3 meet in one place
• January 25-26 2007, Congress Center Nürnberg
• Each builds the same system within 30 hours

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Who Teams

• Team 3 Java abaXX Technology (abaxx.de)
• Team 4 Java Accenture Technology Solutions
  (accenture.de)
• Team 9 Java Innoopract Informations-systeme
  (innoopract.de)
• Team 6 PHP OXID eSales (oxid-esales.com)
• Team 7 PHP Globalpark (globalpark.de)
• Team 8 PHP Zend Technologies (zend.com)

• Team 1 Perl Etat de Genève/Optaros(ge.ch,
  optaros.com).
• Team 2 Perl plusW (plusw.de)
• Team 5 Perl Revolution Systems (revsys.com)

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Why did we go ?

• Help the Perl community
• Perl losing visibility
• yet the technology is excellent and competitive
• ? needs marketing
• Opportunity
• teams of 3 not frequent for Perl
• Geneva not too far from Nuremberg
• modest investment
• Expected benefits for our internal project
• credibility of the team
• credibility of the technology

? risky challenge !
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Task People By Temperament

• PDF intro
• PDF requirements

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What "People by Temperament" Registration for
community portal
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What (2)Trivial Temperament Test (TTT)

• After registration, members can take the TTT
  personality test
• to determine their MBTI personality type

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What (3)Search for members

• Search for members by complex criteria

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What (4)Member list (e.g. for search results)
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What (6)Further requirements

• The above screenshots showed a solution for the
  108 Web GUI requirements
• the one delivered by team3 Java (abaXX
  Technology)
• in addition, there were
• 19 requirements regarding a SOAP webservice
  interface
• 19 non-functional requirements
• browser compatibility, performance, etc.
• 5 rules describing the form of solution delivery
• Each requirement was marked with priority MUST,
  SHOULD, or MAY

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PbT Architecture
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Our experience

• started very fast
• public releases at 1830 and 2230
• late evening got stuck
• no Perl support for WSDL requirements
• lost time to choose/install plotting package
• complexity of search request
• early morning panic mode
• lack of concertation for architectural changes
• regression bugs
• afternoon final release OK but buggy

http//www.plat-forms.org/2007/blog
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The report

• 118 pages !
• published on www.plat-forms.org
• also source code

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Results 1Completeness of solutions
GUI requirements

• Note- Team Java 4 was hampered by a
• huge VMware setup problem for
• almost a full day
• Team Java 9 used a framework still in alpha
  development (RAP)

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(No Transcript)
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Results 2Size of solution
source lines-of-code
NoteFurther manually writtensource code
resides inmodified reused files.
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Results Other

• Many other aspects were compared
• Ease-of-use
• Correctness/reliability
• Modifiability, solution structure
• Team behavior during the development process
• Teams' self-reported subjective experience
• Some of them exhibit further platform differences
• in particular often smaller variance among the
  PHP teams

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Estimations post-hoc
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Winning teams

• We do not have an overall winner
• because people would readily infer a "best
  platform" from it
• But we do have a winner per platform
• Java abaXX Technology (team3)
• in particular for highest completeness
• Perl Etat de Genève/Optaros (team1)
• for best balance of characteristics
• PHP OXID eSales (team6)
• in particular for highest robustness

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Thoughts about the report

• results reflect teams more than platforms
• no distinction DHTML / platform language
• maintainability
• no measure of "understandability"
• "modifiability" simplistic scenario
• robustness
• programming best practice / platform
• some aspects not taken into account
• script for populating the database

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Lessons

• Happy about
• team (common culture, complementary skills)
• technology (Apache, Perl, Catalyst, TT2,
  DBIxDataModel)
• tools (XEmacs, vim, subversion)
• To improve
• planning, priorization, estimates
• preparation

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PbT Data Model
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Exemple de contrôleur Catalyst
1 package PlatFormsModelPbT 2 use
DBIxDataModel 3 4 DBIxDataModel-gtS
chema('PbT') 5 6 PbT-gtTable(qw/PbTMe
mber member member_id/)
7 PbT-gtTable(qw/PbTTTT ttt
ttt_id/) 8 PbT-gtTable(qw/PbTLogin
login login_id/)
9 PbT-gtTable(qw/PbTInterest interest
interest_id/) 10 PbT-gtTable(qw/PbTContac
t_status contact_status member_id
contact_id/) 11 PbT-gtTable(qw/PbTMember_int
erest member_interest member_interest_id/)
12 13 PbT-gtComposition(qw/PbTMember
member 1/, 14
qw/PbTTTT tests /)
15 16 PbT-gtComposition(qw/PbTMember
member 1/, 17
qw/PbTMember_interest member_interests
/) 18 19 PbT-gtAssociation(qw/PbTInt
erest interest 1/, 20
qw/PbTMember_interest
member_interests /)