I have not blogged since long. That is because I have been really busy: my new job, my thesis project and GSoC 2008. That does not mean I have been coding and working all day. Relaxing is important if I want to do things well. Until now, everything is equilibrium: work, family and relax and I really want to keep it, that is why I have considered to propose a more granular timeline so we can evaluate the project progress in a better way.

TinyMCE plugin for inline citation is almost ready. 'almost' does not sound good for me even though I am on schedule. Client side code is ready and tested in Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.5 but as web developer I suspect Internet Explorer will make the difference. Additionally, I have tested with a small set of records, so Neri's and KOKOA's help will be important at this stage. Server code is the incomplete part. Everything is ready to just implement the citation styles class hierachy. I will start it this weekend because I need the peace of Saturdays to write healthy code for this key part. I think the interfaces prototypes proposed will suffer a couple of slight changes which I will explain in my next blog. The plugin has two components: a set of TinyMCE native buttons which insert cite commands and two editors-xtd controls, for citing and generating bibliography section based on the cited records (which are stored in session, so I need to implement an extra hidden plugin for cleaning the session when saving the document). When the editors detects a well-formed cite command, it sends an AJAX request for the text cite. The server response depends of the type of publication and the citation style configured. Firebug extension was my best friend this week. Fortunately, a version compatible with Firefox 3.0 is available.

I owe you my opinion about PDT plugin (PHP for Eclipse). Good extension, better than writing PHP code in Notepad++, gedit and even Kate or Bluefish. Little buggy, sometimes I have to close file tabs due to picks of unresponsiveness or messy screen, but it is ok. I have not configured it to allow debugging but I think I will have to do it.

In relation to the midterm-evaluations. I will be honest: I have not read the requirements yet. I will do it today or tomorrow.

Time for the detailed timeline.
July 4 - July 7: "Cleaning session" problem, APA and MLA citation styles hierachies, small corrections in TinyMCE, control panel for JResearch.
July 7 - July 14: Midterm evaluation, corrections in TinyMCE (including possible issues in Windows platform), remaining citation styles classes, importers hierachy (Bibutils integration) with interface for importing from files.
July 14 - July 21: Publications complete backend, including exporters classes hierachy.
July 21 - July 28: Configuration interface and projects backend.
July 28 - August 4 : Theses and staff backend.
August 4 - August 11: Publications frontend: public and registered access.
August 11 - August 18: Projects, theses and staff frontend: public and registered access
August 18 ... : Testing and correction of issues.
The testing plan will be executed in parallel. Each milestone will be tested the following week.

Finally, my impressions about this first stage: It was hard. My productivity was not satisfactory those 2 weeks. The reason is that I learned and wrote code at the same time. I worked mostly at home with a bad internet connection and spent time dealing with issues derived from lack of experience with Joomla 1.5 framework (I have been respectful of Joomla code standards and design patterns, including support for translations). Be sure that things will be different next week.

As always, feedback is welcome.