Build and Manage Your Cloud
Sun Microsystems came to SitePen with a problem. After pouring expertise into a number of cloud computing initiatives, they needed intuitive client-side applications demonstrating the power and scope of their systems. However, they only had a few short weeks before JavaOne, the conference where they would unveil it all. What to do? They challenged SitePen: design and develop these apps, with sufficient functionality to perform live demos, in six weeks.
Squeezing discovery, visual design, wireframing, prototyping, and production into a little over a month—for two applications—was no small task. SitePen implemented a forked approach, conducting discovery with various teams within Sun's organization simultaneously and relaying everything to the design team incrementally while they developed wireframes expediently.
The Setup
Sun needed web user interfaces for two systems: a virtual data center manager and a cloud-based remote development environment. In many ways, these applications were completely independent.
The virtual data center manager allows Sun's cloud customers to configure and spin up virtual machines, tie them into virtual networks, and cluster them together—all in a dynamic web application. Users can reconfigure their computing resources on the fly, scaling them up and down as necessary, from one simple interface.
The remote development environment gives developers cloud-based access to development environments on Sun-based platforms. Users create projects, upload source code into the cloud, check out a virtual machine into their project, and run builds and various remote applications—again, thought an intuitive interface.
Sun's cloud teams created RESTful APIs to manage each of these systems. SitePen's quickly designed intuitive, simple interfaces, creating working applications that demonstrate key features.
Development
SitePen accelerated development by putting the Dojo Toolkit to good use. Dijit provides excellent layout tools and data-aware widgets, the dojo.data system provides a common interface between such widgets and their data providers, and tools like DojoX RPC and the JsonRestStore act as the bridge between widgets and the server APIs.
Wrap-up
Delivering complex web application is challenging, and delivering simple ones even more so. Both projects were delivered on time, meeting requirements, and ready for JavaOne. Both codebases were delivered ready for further development as well: there were no giant shortcuts taken or demo tricks. Both apps are on the path to being full-blown production applications without needing major refactoring. SitePen rose to the challenge and succeeded in delivering two high quality applications from start to finish in six weeks.
