[MLUG - DISCUSSION] What I'm doing.

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

In case anyone has wondered why I've been mostly silent for the past 
couple months it's because I've been designing and building a new 
website (big surprise), PlumbersStock [http://www.plumbersstock.com/], 
to sell plumbing and HVACR supplies online. This has been an interesting 
project because it's built on top of Activant Eclipse 
[http://distribution.activant.com/eclipse/] (until recently Intuit 
Eclipse) which my company uses for inventory management, customer 
management, etc.

Eclipse is a pretty commonly used enterprise application and it does 
what it was designed for well. However, it's Internet support sucks. 
When I started my job at this company they'd just sunk around $10k to 
buy a supposed out-of-the-box add-on, Web Order Entry, to provide a 
web-based eCommerce solution. It sucked. It sucked so bad we effectively 
decided to just toss it and try something else. So for another $10k they 
have another add-on, Web Integration (formally IDMS-XML), that is 
supposed to expose the inner workings of Eclipse through their own 
XML-based interface. Turns out that WI doesn't actual expose everything 
Eclipse can do, it's slow, it is poorly documented, it is poorly 
understood by Eclipse's, expensive, support staff and to top it off it's 
kind of buggy. So it's been a long and interesting journey building a 
website that uses Eclipse w/ Web Integration for it's back-end.

To begin with Web Integration's XML-syntax, IDMS, is it's own, 
somewhat-twisted, beast so I wrapped it in a web service that exposes 
all the commands as XML-RPC over HTTP. This way I can tap into the 
system from any programming language that supports XML-RPC without 
needing to write, and maintain, a compatibility library. This project 
alone was somewhat huge in that WI uses large and complex bits of XML to 
communicate and since the documentation wasn't very detailed, and 
sometimes wrong, required a lot of trial and error to work out. Finally, 
I've got it tamed but will need to refactor the code to make it easier 
to maintain and as I continue to make use of WI I'll probably find, and 
fix, bugs.

Then once you can actually use Web Integration the fun really begins 
because it's commands have almost no documentation as to what they do or 
how to properly use them. They have lots of different types of id's that 
do various different things but they are documented either. Often the 
documentation expects you to just know internal codes and such from 
Eclipse but it doesn't tell you what these codes are or how to look them 
up. Sometimes you'll be killing yourself trying to do something and 
finally someone from support will talk to the programming department and 
find out that such and such functionality does exist but just isn't 
documented. Other times you expect this to be the case but the 
functionality really doesn't exist - obvious things like calculating 
what an orders tax or shipping will be .

All-in-all working with Eclipse Web Integration can drive you slightly 
mad. I definitely expect more from an add-on I spent $10,000 on. 
Especially since Eclipse itself cost a heck of a lot more than that. 
It's finally starting to come together though.

Eclipse isn't the only layer that communicates by XML-RPC. The website 
is broke up into logical components that are each exposed with XML-RPC. 
All database calls are wrapped neatly in XML-RPC - there is no remote 
access to the database other than through these exposed functions. The 
middleware is all exposed by XML-RPC. This includes application logic, 
other than UI logic, as well as the Eclipse system, systems for 
communicating with UPS, FedEx, etc to calculate shipping, etc. 
Everything is exposed and separated in the same way so the logic is 
always clean.

The cheese gave a few examples of websites he liked the look of. One was 
NewEgg [http://www.newegg.com/] which I kind of borrowed the look from 
although it's changed a lot. I went with a look I call exaggerated 
geometry which basically means it has a realistic but slightly 
cartoonish look. I did almost all the original graphics myself using 
GIMP and then have had my graphic artist redoing them in Illustrator to 
make it easier to tweak colors and to have smoother edges. Product 
photos I have the graphic artist working on making so they'll all look 
3Dish and seem to be popping off the page (in the meantime we have old 
flat pics from the WOE system). We're also planning on running a comic 
strip on the site just to add visual interest and the graphic artist 
draws it by hand and paints it in Photoshop. PlumbersStock, like the 
other websites I've made for this company, will also respond to holidays 
by changing to a themed look. In theory, all this works in Firefox, IE6, 
IE7, Safari, and Opera although there is a minor bug I know I need to 
fix to make it work perfectly in Safari, Opera, and Firefox 3. There are 
probably more glitches I'll find along the way but I make an effort to 
test in all those platforms.

The next big project with PlumbersStock, along with minor feature 
additions and fixes, is going to be the search engine optimization and 
marketing of the website. Already the site keeps it's product database 
posted to Froogle, will let you add it as a search engine to Google 
Toolbar, and will let you add it as a search method to Firefox and any 
other browser that supports OpenSearch. I'm working on making OpenSearch 
work with Amazon A9 - it should work now but for some reason Amazon 
isn't happy with the RSS search capability. Using the same RSS feeds I 
plan to make it so that once you've searched for anything on 
PlumbersStock you can subscribe to that RSS feed to keep track of those 
products. I may expose other bits of data by RSS such as allowing the 
customer to watch their current order progress - that way they won't 
need to keep manually tracking packages etc.

Meanwhile, we dumped most of the old Windows servers and implemented a 
powerful dual quad-core Xeon Linux server running VMWare with several 
Linux servers, a couple Windows servers, and even a FreeNAS server 
running in virtualization. The one Windows server we have left runs the 
actual Eclipse system and is horribly slow and prone to problems. We're 
working on the project to move Eclipse over to an AIX machine. 
Gradually, we're getting rid of Windows and all new systems are Unix or 
Linux. We've added a KVM-over-IP for the servers so that we can get in 
and have complete access even if the systems aren't booting, we have 
remote reboot, and we have remote temperature tracking of the server 
room. If any system goes down it will send my personal email account a 
message notifying me and I'm working on getting a company phone so it 
can SMS me.

PlumbersStock isn't our only website either. We have four other Internet 
websites, two of which are WOE systems, and a Intranet website too. More 
websites are planned in the not-to-distand future too. Along with 
designing, helping build, helping maintain these servers and network, 
being a system admin for Linux, Unix, and Windows, database admin, 
programmer, web designer, etc I also get to manage a couple employees 
and am responsible for handling customer email and phone calls, making 
sure packages are sent properly, etc. Just a little busy. I'm thinking 
of releasing some of the code I created to integrate with Eclipse as 
open source and writing some documentation for working with Eclipse. 
I've half considered writing some sort of book and trying to sell it 
since existing documentation is so poor and if someone is going to spend 
$10,000 for the software maybe they'd spend $100 for a book that tells 
them how to use it. I'll probably just end up posting the documentation 
online though as I don't really want to hassle trying to sell a book.

Okay. So that's what I've been working on lately. Not counting my 
personal projects.

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