After many months of development, I am glad to say that www.asht.info has finally launched.

Who are ASHT?

The Anglo Sikh Heritage Trail is a project of the Maharajah Duleep Singh Centenary Trust. The Trust was first established in 1993, the centenary year of the death of Maharajah Duleep Singh, with the primary objective of highlighting and promoting Anglo Sikh heritage. Since then it has engaged in a series of initiatives, including the Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms exhibition in collaboration with the V&A, the annual Portrait of Courage lecture at the Imperial War Museum and the Jawans to Generals exhibition in collaboration with English Heritage. Other projects have included the commissioning of a bronze statue of Maharajah Duleep Singh at Thetford; the first major piece of Sikh art outside India, as well as two highly successful festivals of Anglo Sikh heritage.

The site has a user friendly CMS, newsletter system as well as various ways for the community to contribute. The site was built using PHP/Codeigniter framework with a MySQL database. Client side development resulted in clean CSS/HTML markup as well as the creation of database driven flash elements. Site wide search makes use of Google’s Custom Search.

Visit ASHT

In my quest for the best web development IDE, i have come across many different editors. Dreamweaver, Various PHP IDE’s as well as small notepad replacements. For one reason or another, all have failed to live up to my expectations.

I don’t ask for much, i aint all that fussy. All i want is an editor that has syntax colouring, code hints, ftp and support for mainstream languages. Well i think the search is over, for the last 6 weeks i have used with near perfection an editor that has all and more.

Aptana is an editor that is built on Eclipse. It has an array of simple features that you would actually use in day to day development. Not to mention support for additional plugins (as Eclipse, e.g. CFEclipse). It has also fixed a lot of the bugs that has plagued Eclipse for a while now, such as the way it would mangle code during an undo operation.

Definitely worth a look… Aptana home page

For a while now, I have been using Microsoft’s Fiddler to help capture http traffic between the browser and the server. This helps in debugging requests made from flash and Ajax applications. I upgraded to the latest version of Fiddler and have found it to randomly not capture certain requests, which until I realised that was the case, was focusing on areas which I thought weren’t working.

Whilst searching for an alternative, I stumbled across ServiceCapture by Kevin Langdon (http://www.kevinlangdon.com/serviceCapture/) and so far I am mightily impressed.

Its ease of use and simple interface makes debugging a much less painful experience.

It can capture the following types of requests:

One feature I feel is missing is the ability to reissue requests. When developing flash applications, it can take several clicks and submissions before you get to the screen which makes the request that you are debugging. If the code still doesn’t work, the only way to re-test is to hit refresh in the browser and work you way through the flash movie again. What would be much easier is if you could right click on a request and select “Re-issue”.

Initially, I struggled to get it working with Firefox. To get it working requires the use of a javascript file. There is a guide here explaining what you need to do. If you do encounter issues or have questions, the forum is a great place to start.

Despite that, and for the price, it has already saved me many hours of debugging.

In the previous post i talked about how i liked ActiveCollab and decided to cough up the reddies for a copy. Well i have since requested a refund under their 30 day money back offer. Reason? Because having used it more and more i feel that the product was released 6 months too early. There is still a load of issues with functionality that need addressing before it can become a product that’s worth the money.

So the hunt continues… (or i may revert back to plan A and build my own!)

Since I began freelancing, project management amounted to IM, email and phone calls. In an attempt to create a place for clients to manage projects thus allowing me more time to complete projects had forced me to invest in an web based management system.

I have been looking around for a while, and having trialled MANY there was always something which stopped me from continuing using them. It was either its complicated interface, confusing process or running costs.

About a year ago I discovered ActiveCollab. AC was an open source project which started off life as an alternative “host on your own server” Basecamp.

Since then its popularity had steadily grown, forcing the developers to take the product more seriously, to the point where they recently released the first commercially available version, 1.0.

I knew of its impending release so decided to wait to see if it would fill the gap. First impressions were that it was more than a mere upgrade. It had been completed redesigned and developed from the ground up. The interface has a nice, easy on the eye feel to it with well laid out sections.

The demo left a lot to be desired, access wasn’t at an administrative level so a lot of the features weren’t available to test. The only way you could test everything would be to purchase a license.

Whilst waiting for the release of AC, I stumbled across another application created by a company called StuffedGuys. Nova Factory has a similar feature list with one additional feature which, for me, made it stand out from the crowd. NF had the ability to carry out discussions via email. As a user, I would initiate a discussion about, for example, an area of an active project. The system would email a group of recipients (either the client or team members). Once the recipients replied, the reply would automatically append itself to the discussion within NF. This meant that team members and clients would not need to login to the system to leave comments and could instead reply to the emails.

The cost of NF was considerably less and had been around a lot longer. Yet I decided to go for AC. Why? Because of the development team, improvements are being made all the time, with bug fixes and general usage. They also seem keen to listen to their user base and take on board suggestions, many of which are about adding email based discussions, a feature which NF has.

AC was released on the 5th October so it is fair to say there are a fair few bugs and issues that need ironing out. But their near instant support response goes a long way in reassuring you that the money spent was worth it.

How has it been so far?
Installation was a breeze, create the database, go through the wizard and you are up and running. The downsides so far are the bugs and issues that have come to light. There is a slowly expanding help section, but the forums are a hive of activity so you can expect a response to most queries. There is an API if you feel like adding new functionality, unfortunately there is next to no documentation on this… yet.

Summary:

Design 3/5
Looks really slick, but from a usability perspective it could do with better use of colours to highlight changes on the dashboard.

Features 3.5/5
Has plenty to begin with but could do with more e.g. email based discussions, and let’s face it. Will anyone ever give it a 5?

Ease-of-Use 3/5
Has bugs and issues which need resolving.

Documentation 3.5/5
Would have been nice to have had a comprehensive help section from the start.

Value for Money 3.5/5
Until issues have been resolved, will remain at three and a half.

AC has a long way to go before it’s the polished product we would like it to be, fortunately with the team behind it, you can’t go wrong.