This blog is a place to meet our experts. We share technical knowhow and lessons learned from software projects, and discuss clever solutions for real-world problems.
We recently finished a subproject to integrate our mgm Cosmo insurance software with an external CRM system. Both systems had to exchange XML documents in a reliable and robust manner in order to keep their data in sync. We used Apache Camel as the middleware to handle all the transfers between the Java and .NET based systems. This blog series discusses our solution and shares our experiences with Apache Camel.
When we developed this sales reporting solution for the insurance sector, we went for a mobile, browser-based dashboard that renders the reports on the client-side and thus enable a high degree of interactivity. That means that once the reporting data is delivered, the client should be able to e.g. drill down into the data or slide along the time axis. This article focuses on the technical aspects of the data delivery in JSON format and interactive charting in the browser.
The KICKZ online store is our latest e-commerce project that has gained a deep integration with Facebook. This blog article presents the four ways to utilize Facebook for a better and smoother customer experience. First we show how customers can use their Facebook accounts for registration and login into the online store using the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Next we discuss accessing the customer data from Facebook’s Open Graph (if user’s permission is given) in order to prefill registration and order forms. And finally, we deal with product reviews and forwarding customer Facebook posts to the Facebook wall of the online store.
In this blog article we discuss how Fredhopper, an advanced site search and merchandising product, can be integrated into the hybris eCommerce suite not only to search for products, but to create cross selling and campaigns as well. In the used scenario hybris is the foundation of a marketplace with a few million products from thousands of vendors.
My colleague Slavomír Jeleň and I are currently working on a logistics management application for an international food retailer. It’s a data-oriented application that performs pre-calculation steps on billions of rows with PL/SQL stored procedures. In order to ensure the correctness of these calculations, we devised a solution for unit testing the stored procedures in Oracle based on DBUnit.
My project was part of our customer’s effort to replace all of the enterprise applications with web applications based on a standardized technology stack. In this strategic move, the call center integration was a crucial step. As it turned out, the technical design of the new call center telephony solution was quite challenging. We did not only learn a lot about CTI; we also had to implement the system to be scalable and ensure that it handles more than 1000 call center agents.
This article describes how we configured and used the Varnish web cache for the popular German online shop www.lidl.de. Varnish gave us a tremendous performance boost. With this new caching setup, we easily achieve request rates of several thousand pages per second, which are quite common during marketing campaigns like special offers.
This second part of our blog series continues with the topic of direct involvement of customers and gives some practical examples of when, where and how to introduce and include your customer into JIRA. We will then discuss two of mgm’s proven real-world workflows and use them as case studies about appropriate modes for successful customer participation. You will also learn about our recommended ways of keeping the complexity of huge JIRA projects from the customer.
This two-part series shows how JIRA can be used for other things than just bug tracking and presents mgm’s experiences with embracing JIRA in nearly all parts of traditional and agile project lifecycles, resulting in a number of customized, optimized JIRA workflows and processes. In this first part, I will give you an overview of challenges we faced over the years and how we adapted JIRA to meet them. You will get a taste of the vast variety of uses we have found for JIRA and understand why we decided to use only one tool instead of many.
Dr. Christian Winkler,
26.10.2011 |
9 Comments 
By coding the page state into the URL, even single-page web applications can support deep bookmarks and the browser’s back button. The most accepted approach is to utilize the location hash, i.e. the local part of the URL. This article explains this technique and what pitfalls you should be aware of, based on my team’s experience from building an AJAX interface for Solr. You will also learn about the HTML5 History API, which is a second, more modern technique.
This part explains some of the sophisticated software technology that is working behind the scenes in our rule-based test-data generator for form-centric applications. You will see that a simple enumeration of all possible ways to fill in a form is likely doomed to run longer than the age of the universe. Therefore more efficient techniques are needed to make the seemingly impossible possible.
For the e-commerce business, it is very important to have a valid and correct address base. Sending packages to incorrect addresses causes significant losses, since packages are not delivered and sent back. In the case of the Kickz online shop, we faced exactly this problem. Thus, we thought about how to improve and force users to enter correct addresses. Learn how we used Google’s Geocoding service to solve this problem.
Christian Belka,
16.6.2011 |
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Spring Roo, a new contender to Grails and Ruby on Rails, provides flexible scaffolding for Spring based applications. We used Spring Roo in a web project to quickly provide working software in order to discuss features and gather feedback. This article shows how we generated an early prototype and transitioned to early development and then to production code.
For our recent online shop project, we required a full-text, multi-criteria product search. Lucene, the popular Java search engine, is an ideal candidate for this functionality. But in order to meet the high performance requirement, we had to extend its usage beyond standard full-text search. This posting describes our solution including index switching and using Lucene as a simple NoSQL database.
The previous part discussed why a unit test for a class should be written by the developer of that class, and why a functional test should be created by an independent tester. This posting argues that functional tests should not be part of the build process of the product, but instead should be developed and executed separately. For this, I give guidelines for setting up an independent validation system.
