Proposal Review With Mr. Liaw

Date : 29th June 2007 (Friday) 6:30pm
Location : SMU
Attendees : Mr. Liaw, Jia Liang, Xue Bin, Su Yi, Jaron

The purpose of today's meeting is to show Mr. Liaw our amended proposal and to ensure that we're on the right track. We had also made some clarifications with Mr. Liaw on the scope of our project, Mr. Liaw suggested that we should focus more on the developer's toolkit itself instead of the web-portal/web-site and the admin module, that could be further enhanced after we've developed the developer's toolkit. Below are some advices and discussions from today's meeting.

Suggested Function/Area of Research

• Include spell check function (i.e. to let users spell check contents and reports)
• Not neccessary need to drag and drop, we may explore other ways of doing the UI too

Proposal Changes

• Include our blog address in the proposal
• Include clients/actors in the system overview
• Add assumptions in proposal
• Do a spell check on the proposal to eliminate the spelling errors
• Tidy up the system architecture diagram

Other Issues

• Need to implement CVS soon
• Decide on where and how we can host our developer's toolkit

Confirm Functionalities of Project

Date : 27th June 2007 (Wednesday) 6:30pm
Location : Raffles City - StarBucks
Attendees : Xue Bin, Su Yi, Jaron

We had another group discussion today to confirm on the functionalities of the developer toolkit and to discuss about the changes of our project proposal. JiaLiang was unable to attend this discussion as he was having fever. Last week, Mr. Liaw has sent us the feedback on our project proposal, we have researched on Dojo, JetSpeed and some websites such as http://www.pageflakes.com/ to get an idea of how Ajax and Dojo can help us in designing the user interface of the developer toolkit and portal.

Functions of Developer ToolKit

• Step through wizard to create web-portal/web-site
• Allow customization of fonts and colors
• Template selection
• User group management (i.e. maintain the user groups that the web-portal can support)
• Access control (i.e. identify which user group can access to which module and the actions that they are allowed to perform)
• Preview selected configurations
• Developer toolkit can create more than one web-portal/web-site for each user
• Developer toolkit administrator will create a login access for the user to will be using the developer toolkit to set up web-portals/websites
• All editing of the web-portal/web-site configurations will only be done at the developer toolkit

Skype Conference

Date : 23rd June 2007 (Saturday) 11:30am
Location : Skype - online discussion
Attendees : Mr. Liaw, Jia Liang, Xue Bin, Su Yi, Jaron

We held an online discussion today with Mr. Liaw to further discuss on the requirements of the project and to clarify some of our uncertainties such as the scope of the toolkit, the use of open source and API. Mr. Liaw has also sent us an open source JavaScript toolkit (Dojo) that we can research on and use it to develop our user interface of the toolkit with AJAX.

To research and compare

• Programming tools (PHP and Java)
• Open source tools (Dogo and JetSpeed)
• AJAX

Focus on the functions of the developer's toolkit

• Allow customisation of modules
• Drag and drop (need to further explore on how this can be done)
• Allow choosing of templates
• Customise form layouts
• Search control (prompt user for which database to perform the search on)
• Group user profiles (e.g. nurses, doctors, dentists)
• Should be a web-based toolkit
• Minimise installation at client side (refer to blogger)
• Step through wizard for users to create web portal
• readily created templates
• Allow to insert/upload video clips (need to further explore on how this can be done)
• Customise font (e.g. size, font, bold, italics)

Proposal related issues

• Need a diagram to show what is available in the toolkit (e.g step through wizard, access control for different users, customisation of the interface)
• Include comparison of the programming tools and open source
• Decide on the platform and development tools to be used
• Identify all the tookit modules to be developed/included

Other issues

• We are allowed to use open source or external API
• Prototype can be in screenshots format
• Next meeting on Friday 29th June 2007 after work (7pm) in town area (location to be decided again)

Online Proposal Discussion

Date : 21st June 2007 (Thursday) 8:00pm
Location : MSN - online discussion
Attendees : Jia Liang, Xue Bin, Su Yi, Jaron

Our project supervisor has sent us a reviewed version of our project proposal with some changes. We need to focus our project as a developer toolkit instead of a web portal, previously we have been focusing too much on the web portal and neglecting it's ultimate objective as a developer toolkit. We have decided to discuss in MSN this evening at 8:30pm to clarify on the points that our supervisor has identified in our proposal and discuss on how we should put the focus back onto the project as a toolkit and we might need to change our architecture design too.

Objective and Focus of Project

• Develop a toolkit for health specialists to create web portal without any programming language
• It is not just a web portal that we are creating, we are creating a toolkit that creates web portals
• The toolkit will be able to allow selection of the web portal template and features of the web portal
• The admin user (person who creates the web portal with the toolkit) will be able to customize and edit the web portal's settings and features

Uncertainties

• The toolkit will only generate a web portal for each installation, or will it be able to generate multiple web portals for each particular installation

Development Issues

• Should we use servlets/PrintWrite/XML to generate the web portal codes
• Propose to store settings of web portal as booleans in database

Proposed Next Meeting

• Saturday 23rd June 2007 (To Be Confirmed)

Finalise Project Proposal

Date : 17th June 2007 (Sunday) 10:00am
Location : Raffles City - StarBucks
Attendees : Jia Liang, Xue Bin, Su Yi, Jaron

Met up to finalise the project proposal which have to be sent to Mr Liaw by 18th June (Monday) 2007, there was a delay in submitting the proposal as we needed more time to research and discuss on the system architecture and functionalities of the project. We've also further discussed in details on the functionalities of the web portal and will try to produce the neccessary documents and diagrams by end of this week (24th June 2007, Sunday).

We're planning to meet up with Mr. Liaw this Saturday in SIM if it is convenient for him to ensure that we are on the right track and to eliminate our uncertainties.

Issue Resolved

• Report generation will generate reports of medical diagnosis of patients
• Patient's profile/information will be retrieved from an existing database of the hospital
• Patient's profile/information will not be maintained by the web portal
• Specified and discussed the problem domain
• Fixed the content page of project proposal
• Added in the finalised version of system architecture in project proposal

Things to do

• Use case diagrams of the system
• Entity-Relationship Design
• Database design
• Data dictionary
• Identify the functionalities of the toolkit and web portal
• Set up the environment for project development

Target for coming week

• Meet up with Mr. Liaw in SIM on Saturday (23rd June 2007)
• Produce the neccessary diagrams and database design

Proposal Decision Meeting

Date : 13th June 2007 (Wednesday) 11:30am
Location : SIM
Attendees : Jia Liang, Xue Bin, Su Yi, Jaron

As it is our last exam today and we can finally devote our time to the Final Year Project, we met up in school right after the exams today to discuss and finalise some issues of our project and proposal. We have given up the use of JetSpeed as after some research and also decided to place the focus of our project on health specialists who will be using the portal for knowledge sharing.

The project website needs to be done by next week, as the timeline is rather tight and due to previous commitments on the examinations, we will only produce a first draft of the project website which will be enhanced later.

Research Areas

• Purpose of portal
• Functions of portal
• Technologies used
• Existing health portals

Focus of project

• Information sharing among specialists and the public
• Users will use toolkit to develop web portals
• The basic features of the web portal includes discussion forum, data mining, report generation, post articles, registration

Target Deadline and Deliverables

• Email proposal to Mr. Liaw on Friday (15th June 2007)