CIMS

From POINTS

Contents 1 Aim 2 Infrastructure 3 Design 3.1 Missing from current design 3.2 Planned Modules 4 Progress

Aim

• To produce a business orientated web based interactive business flow tool.
• To be able to remove/reduce the dependance on disparate systems such as accounting packages, office packages etc.
• To make it easy enough to be able to offer the system at a price that small businesses can afford.

Infrastructure

Web Server:

• Apache - to provide ssl encryption and redirection
• Tomcat - to provide the web application.

Database:

• Should be agnostic to the database backend - currently using MySQL
  • Using hibernate in code to achieve this

Front End:

• zk - AJAX without having to learn javascript.

Programming Language:

• Java - which I don't know. As zk has been built in Java, it makes sense to use it as it has the most support out of the languages that zk can support.

Design

The design I am working with is:

• A simple header for the company name.
• A tabbox for the majority of the page containing content.
• A fish eye menu (think Mac OSX) for a menu.

The system is being designed to be themable (colours, company logo etc.) and modular (add and alter modules as needed).

When the main page loads, it consults a database to see what the user has rights to (after log on). The fish eye menu is generated depending on what the user can and can't do. When an item is picked, a new tab in the tab box is created (sort of mirroring the functionality of a task bar) and the contents of that module's page is loaded into the tab pane.

The modules should be able to be strung together in some way to indicate work flow.

Missing from current design

A notification area for incomplete actions and messages.

Planned Modules

• System Admin
• Preferences
• Reporting (find a simple way to be able to produce a report containing the information wanted without having to know the databases structure)
  • Must be savable.
• Statistics (same as reporting but results can then be plotted onto graphs)
  • Must be savable
• Email
• Groupware
• Wiki
• Basic Office Suite
  • Only for the 1 of the 3 reasons
    • The once off's
    • Prototyping
    • Doing a half arsed job
  • Could be extended for templates (report writing etc.)
• Other modules based on context of business

Progress

As of 8th December, 2009

• Main Page
  • Done
    • Basic design of main page using zuml (zk user markup language).
    • Have done up some example code using Hibernate and Java to access database.
    • Handling of the fish eye menu - how to determine which button has been pressed and what parameters should be sent to make this happen.
    • Basic main page design (currently without notification area - need to chose a component to use here).
  • Not Done
    • Adding Tab and Tab pane to Tab box when item selected on fish eye bar.

• Modules

Nothing done as of yet. System Administration to be done first.