In this post I am interviewing David Henriksen who used AgileSites for the implementation of a Telco website and also developed an extension of the AgileSItes framework.
I m a developer, and have 15 years of experience which includes Professional and open source
development in different kind of languages, such as C/C++, Java, Php, ASP.
A. I have 8 years experience in Java, and 2 years with fatwire. That includes both backend enterprise
applications, and more frontend oriented work with Java and fatwire as a platform.
A. I think the normal cycle requires a lot of manual work. You have to manually create your attributes, definitions, etc. When it comes to templates, it is also very manual and therefore also very hard to debug, since it's pretty much trial on error, if things doesn't work. You really have to have a good insight knowledge to fatwire, for maximum use.
I was introduced to this framework on a workshop, and must admit I already saw the advantages within the first couple of hours, since I come from a Java world, and is a developer.
We have had a lot of overhead time with doing things more manually, since it requires a lot of know how, when it comes to debugging, but it can also be a trivial task, just to do more complex modeling - and when it comes to version controlling your model and templates, with several development branches, it becomes near impossible.
A. With AgileSites everything has become more rapid. It is super flexible, everything is source controlled, and supports therefor branching when it comes to modeling, and templating. Since the whole model is done in Java code, it is easy to restore broken elements, or even do debug stepping when a template is failing - if your unit test doesn't catch the error; this too is very useful. To sum it up, AgileSites has made development more rapid, more transparent and more flexible. It basically gives the developer the possibility to make best use of the time for developing, instead of interface clicking.
Before AgileSites, it was very hard to be an agile development team. Now with the flexibility that AgileSites offers, agility has become an opportunity and natural choice, when developing for Oracle Webcenter Sites.
A. Currently I work in a smaller team, which is developing a new responsive website for a Danish telco brand, using AgileSites together with webcenter sites. Furthermore I'm using the ZKoss
framework for developing the self service part.
A. I wanted an easy way to model asset definitions in AgileSites, which could help with supporting
rapid development, but also give a certain amount of transparency of the data model which is a
given, when
you design bigger sites with complex models. To solve this, I developed an annotation driven modeling method - inspired from JPA and
Hibernate. All you have to do, is to make a simple POJO class, which defines the asset definition and
attributes. It of course supports various properties, such as parent links, multiples, editors, asset
types and so on.
A. The next natural step, would be extending the model so it can be used as a data container, in the
templates. By doing so, it will add safety to the template attribute references.
