We wrapped up the Intalio User Conference yesterday. I was told to present, but not what, so I picked up three projects I'm personally excited to see happen. RESTful BPEL, Simpel and Singleshot.
Since the audience wasn't particularly technical, I didn't get to talk shop and there wasn't much there that would news to you. But I did get to demo Singleshot with some catching screen shots, and I want to share that part of the presentation with you. http://people.apache.org/~assaf/Singleshot_Intalio_User_Conf.pdf Singleshot is a task manager. A task manager tracks people and tasks. It tells you which task you should be doing, which tasks you should be doing, and let's you track other people's task that are of interest to you. A task manager is a really simple application, but not all task managers are simple to use applications. So Singleshot started from asking the question "what can we do better?" And as I thought about it, I ended up with three requirements. Requirement #1: Build a task manager that people can use. A task manager is a productivity application. Productivity applications should help you get the work done, but stay out of the way. You don't get more work done by using complex UIs full of forms and controls and other administrative debris. So really important requirement is getting the user experience right. Requirement #2: Build a task manager that people will use. People have different ways of managing their workload. Everyone I showed the demo to loved the UI. Still, some people manage their day from the inbox, they'll want to do everything via e-mail. Others live in the calendar, so that would be a way to put tasks in front of them. I personally use feed readers a lot. And why not IM? So the second requirement is about making tasks accessible from different applications and even devices. Requirement #3: Build a task manager that developers can use. That's often a conflicting requirement, some developers love complex architectures, other prefer to keep it simple. So for now, we're going with simple. But clearly we can't all agree on using a single tool or platform. You might be build a PHP application that needs task management, or starting tasks from a BPEL process. You may want a JavaScript widget that shows tasks in a portal, or fancy Flash animation. Maybe you want to script it with Python, or run some management tasks from Perl scripts. Basically we want something that can be used anywhere without forcing heavy infrastructure or platforms on developers. Code speaks better than any PowerPoint presentation, and we've got enough code to run a full demo and show these concepts in action. I think it's time to roll up the sleeves and turn this into a working, kick-ass task manager. You can check out the code from http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ode/sandbox/singleshot For the Git inclined: git://github.com/Assaf/singleshot.git I'm sure that won't come as a surprise, this is all built on Rails 2.1, so you'll need that installed first. The README file has more setup instructions. Assaf
