Remember One Another

The past week feels like it has really flown by, no doubt in part to my very earnest effort and desire to get the daily email going. I came very close and might have made it had it not been for a thing of beauty in code that commanded my attention yesterday and a very weird thing that prevented me today from successfully using the thing of beauty to send out daily emails.

In addition, I’ve not wanted to start sending the daily prayer list emails without a way for users to disable this feature. That requires a new page, a new field in the database, and everything in between. Worst of all, it requires me to make a decision about UI design, which is paralyzing for me, but I will try to just put something out there and rework it later.

The great news is that I did resolve the very weird thing and have been successfully sending out admin emails to myself, so all the underlying pieces are now in place to do the daily prayer list email. I’m more impressed than ever with Google AppEngine (ROA’s hosting platform). It’s not being noticed much in the business press, I don’t think, but I’m convinced it is a game-changer that will open up a whole new world of custom and niche applications.

As always, thank you for praying. For a while there, I didn’t think I was going to make it, but the Lord has given me grace to persevere and to keep chasing the lion…

I completed a major code refactoring today to separate the admin UI from the public Web app UI. The admin UI is needed to manage the daily email queues, and I’ve been putting off building it, but the shell is now in place and we’re scooting along. This was huge as I was very discouraged earlier today, but the Lord gave grace in the form of a burst of coding and problem-solving energy. Thank you for praying.

After much hand-wringing, I have finally managed to get Daily ROA working in the Web app. This is the core of RememberOneAnother. It collates prayer requests from all your prayer lists into a single daily prayer list. Currently, all prayer lists default to weekly rotation, which you cannot change (yet). You can, however, shuffle each list.

In order to try it out, you’ll need to delete any existing prayer lists and create new ones.

Try it out at http://dmcsandbox.appspot.com. Don’t spend too much effort here in the sandbox, as you’ll need to recreate your lists when the app gets its real URL. But do try it out and let me know what you think. I know the UI needs a lot of prettying up. Volunteers welcome!

If you know Java Web development and would like to learn GWT and Google AppEngine, I’d like to talk with you. I am underwater on this project and could really use a coding partner to keep things moving. Please shoot me a note at dchandler ‘at’ turbomanage d0t com.

Olympic athlete and later missionary Eric Liddle said in the movie Chariots of Fire, “When I run, I feel His pleasure.” There have been a few times in my career when I have had the exhilarating sense of knowing that this is what I was made for. Now is one of those times, and I am very grateful for it. Hours seemed like minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed coding, and even more enjoyed writing about it at my geek blog, TurboManage, which this week grew to over 300 page views in one day. My corporate job of seven weeks ago now seems like a distant memory. I am inclined to suggest that every software engineer should save up and take a four-month sabbatical every few years to enjoy coding again. My spirit has been so refreshed!

Praise the Lord for significant progress this week! I crossed a couple more technical hurdles around unit testing and the database, so the pool of technical unknowns continues to dwindle. I have released an alpha version at dmcsandbox.appspot.com. It doesn’t look real pretty yet, and doesn’t have a fraction of the features that the finished product will have; nevertheless, you can login with your Gmail account, create prayer lists, and add prayer requests that will still be there next time you log in. No daily email yet, no editing, and no sharing with groups. But it’s a start, and it’s live for you to preview.

This coming week I will, Lord-willing, complete editing capability for prayer requests, start the daily email, and launch the RememberOneAnother.com Web site (but not the app yet).

Please note: any data you create at the sandbox site is test data. The real app will be launched at a different URL with a clean database, but please do feel free to log in now and post any usability comments back here.

Thank you for your prayers, and please keep praying!

This has been a great week overall. Lots of late nights, but gained real traction. You can now create and delete prayer lists, and quickly enter items in a list. Added a bit of eye candy (such as animated loading… graphics). I got quite a bit deeper into the AppEngine DataStore this week and feel comfortable with the basics of saving and retrieving data at this point. Also feeling really comfortable with GWT and have learned how to build most of the kinds of things I’ll need, so more and more, I can just turn the crank.

Thank you for your prayers–the Lord has given me grace to keep going physically and emotionally, and I am as enthusiastic as ever about seeing this come to birth.

Geeks: I am blogging all the gory technical details at turbomanage.wordpress.com.

Grateful,
David Chandler

Well, it’s starting to feel like a software project. I had hoped to announce a limited beta last week in which individual users could create new prayer lists and add items; however, I think I’m about a week behind. I spent a good deal of time learning how to navigate from one “place” to another in GWT. It was a great learning experience, but definitely slowed me down. However, *this* week I really do think I’ll be there. Thanks for your continued prayers.

As an aside, I could use some help with GWT and CSS. I’ve got the basic patterns well enough established that I think I could turn someone loose on, say, the Users and Groups module. If you’d like to help out, simply post a comment on this page. It won’t actually show up, but I’ll get the message and reply to you via email.

This was a hugely productive week, both in terms of clawing my way up the GWT learning curve as well as eliminating some of the highest risk parts of the project. I successfully rewired the fledgling app into good MVP form using the outstanding gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch frameworks. I now have in place a very clean, simple, and powerful foundation on which to build, and some of the things I was saving for later are now done, too, like securing the service layer and passing a token to prevent cross site request forgery attacks.

Everything works on AppEngine as expected, and with the plumbing in place, I can now begin to really crank out functionality. Next week, I expect to complete the functionality required for the initial beta release: namely, the ability to create prayer lists and requests for yourself, and to get a daily prayer bulletin via email.