Wrapping up Week 7: “When I run, I feel His pleasure”

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!

Week 6 in review

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

Week 4 wrap-up: in over my head?

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.

A Challenge to Shine

Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life…

Philippians 2:14-16 NKJV

As Christians, we are frequently dismayed by the moral decay around us and easily identify with Paul’s description of the Romans in Phillipi as a “crooked and perverse generation.” But what to do about it? How can we shine as lights in this dark world? Perhaps our first thoughts are of doing good deeds, starting a ministry or political action group, or becoming an evangelist. All these have their place, but Paul’s prescription in these verses is shockingly simple and intensely challenging: “Do all things without complaining and disputing.”

Do our family members see us shining in this way? Our co-workers? Our brothers and sisters at church? Imagine how different our homes / workplaces / churches might look if all of God’s children did all things without complaining and disputing. Shine, indeed!

Week 3 Wrap-up

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.

Week 2 Wrap-Up

Week 2 progress was good, though not quite what I expected. I had hoped to spend most of my time creating the user interface, and instead spent most of it learning about the Model-View-Presenter pattern for use with GWT development and creating some framework code to “get browser history right” from the beginning. So far, so good, and as of today, I’m starting on the screen to manage prayer lists.

Google AppEngine Rocks

So far so good with Google AppEngine. I was at first afraid that I would have to create separate model objects on both the client and server side as the GWT compiler was complaining about model classes not being serializable (DTOs, yuck). Since my model class did in fact implement Serializable, I thought it was the JDO persistence annotations messing it up. But not to worry, I merely forgot the public empty constructor. Now GWT and JDO can use the same model class to represent an object, and life is good.

I successfully created my first prayer list using Google DataStore (AppEngine).

Now it’s time to dig deep into GWT to understand how best to wire related parts of the view together with each other, the controller, and the model…

Log in with your Google account

The initial releases of RememberOneAnother will be hosted using Google AppEngine because it’s inexpensive and a relatively simple way to get started. A side benefit is that you’ll be able to use your Google account (Gmail, etc.) to log in. I got this working today patterned after the StockWatcher sample app for GWT. You can try it out at http://dmcsandbox.appspot.com/ Nothing there yet, but hey, you’ve got to write login sometime!

Technie notes:

1. The latest Google plugin for Eclipse has a nice feature that gives you a red squiggly when you create a service interface and prompts you to auto-create the Async interface. That pretty much takes all the pain out of using the GWT-RPC mechanism and lets you take advantage of its serialization / deserialization capability.
2. If you create a folder named “public” under your GWT module, all files will automatically be copied to the exploded war folder at GWT compile time. This is great for HTML, CSS, images, etc. But you need to watch your hrefs carefully, as all resource URLs are prefixed with your application name. For example, if you have a public/images folder, the URL would be /your_app/images. This way, you can have multiple GWT modules copying into the same war structure, but GWT can keep them separate.
3. In order to make the Run button browse to the correct start page for your GWT project in Eclipse, right-click the project | Google | Web Toolkit Settings, then click Run/Debug Settings on the left. Select your project, click the Edit button and click the GWT tab to set the URL for browsers. You should also set a welcome-file name in web.xml so you can browse directly to your site name in the hosted app.
4. The GWT compiler seems to like any code referenced by GWT code (such as model objects) to be contained in a sub-package of the client package. Java won’t complain about your imports, but GWT will. I tried the <source> and <inherits> tags, but haven’t figured out a way around this yet.

Full speed ahead!

Today marks the my last day of full-time employment with one of the world’s most admired software companies. Why would I leave great people, pay, and benefits to devote four months to the RememberOneAnother project? Especially in this economy? In short, it is a confluence of two ideas:

1. The Lord Jesus Christ whom I serve has called me to this work. They say that an entrepreneur doesn’t have an idea–the idea has him. Well, so it is. RememberOneAnother uniquely combines my God-created gifts and abilities with my goals and desires to improve my own prayer life and to serve the church of Christ with a tool that will help  Christians to pray more effectively. More consistent and effective prayer is an urgent need of the hour, as only God can really do something about the problems the world faces. And after long, careful study, I have come to the conviction that I am called to do this work  (for more on this idea, I highly recommend Finding a Job You Can Love by Ralph Mattson.

2. The Lord Jesus Christ has promised to provide for the temporal needs of all who seek first His kingdom (Matt 6:25-34). This is not to say that all Christians must engage in “full-time Christian service,” but rather to suggest that the promise of our Lord makes no distinction between the corporate employee, the business owner, or the missionary. You can seek His kingdom first in any employment because it is a spiritual kingdom. You can seek to become like Him and to lead others to Him in any kind of work situation (except unlawful, of course). The Lord has always provided exactly what I needed when I needed it in my years of corporate employment, and I trust that as I continue to seek Him first in launching ROA, He will continue to provide. He does not promise to make us rich, nor that it will be easy, nor that He will provide in exactly the way we expect or desire, but He does promise to provide what we need, and everyone who seeks His kingdom first may claim this promise.

Your Web / database progammer for Christ,
David

Coming Soon