Blogging Roller

WIP: Common Navigation

Dave Johnson — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:08:44 +0000

This is the second in my series of Web Integration Patterns. Check out the intro at this URL http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/web_integration_patterns

Synopsis

Make separate web sites and applications appear to be one by using common user interface elements for navigation.

Motivations

Provide easy navigation between integrated web sites & applications.
Make separate web sites appear to be one and parts of the same overall user interface.

Related patterns

Links

This pattern is an extension of the Links pattern. The idea is to use links combined with common user interface (UI) elements, as a way to provide navigation between integrated sites and to make the separate sites appear to be parts of a whole application. This pattern is usually implemented via a banner with links, a tabs or some other type of menu component.

To make this work, somebody has to create the common navigation, give it an attractive design, decide which web sites or applications are included in the navigation. Consequently, this pattern works well for a set of web sites owned by the same organization, or a suite of packaged web applications.

Pros and Cons

The advantages of Common Navigation are that it works, it does make separate web sites seem to be part of one integrated whole and it's relatively easy to implement. One disadvantage of this approach is that the Common Navigation elements can either conflict with, in a visual sense, or distract from the web sites themselves. But if you're selling a suite of web applications, you've got control of whole design and you can solve this problem.

Examples

Here are some examples of Common Navigation that I see almost everyday. The first is Google.

Common Navigation in Google web applications

Google Mail, Calendar and other Google apps all share a Common Navigation bar across the top of the page. Google decides which apps appear in the menu, and the tech blogs whine whenever an item is moved or removed from the line-up. This is a pretty shallow integration: just links to applications and no more.

Now, let's see a deeper example.

Common Navigation in IBM Lotus Connections

IBM Lotus Connections is a suite of social software applications including social networking, blogs, wiki, forums, file sharing and etc. As you can see below, Common Navigation is used to provide links, not just to applications, but into specific parts of applications. For example, the Latest Entries page in the Blogs app, and the Wikis that I own vs. Public Wikis.

Next, another suite example.

Common Navigation in IBM Rational Team Concert

IBM Rational's Jazz-based products use Common Navigation, but with a project-orientation, showing a user's project's within each application. You can see this below in Rational Team Concert. A development project spans different applications and may have requirements managed by one web application, defects tracked by another, test cases managed by a third and so on. Each user sees the right menu for their projects.

Next, an example that's not a suite of web applications.

Common Navigation in StumleUpon

Another example is StumbleUpon. When you use StumbleUpon, you see the banner at the top of every page. You press the Stumble! button and a you see a randomly selected web page from anywhere on the web, or from some specific category of web site, and you still see the StumbleUpon banner. The StumbleUpon banner makes the whole web seem like one big site, deigned for "stumbling" around and sharing the things you find with friends.

Wrapping up

I wasn't sure that Common Navigation really deserved its own pattern, as it's really just a simple and obvious application of the Links pattern, but I think this works. As always, feedback is welcome. What did I get wrong? What did I leave out?

Next up: Web Annotations.

Social Connector for Rational Team Concert

Dave Johnson — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Mainsoft's Team Concert to Lotus Connections integration is getting better and better. I know this because I spent about 12 hours last week offering demos of the product at Innovate 2010. The except below is from a blog post on Jazz.net about the newest preview release. You can try it now. There's a download link at the end of the post and, like Team Concert, it's nice and easy to install and configure.

Build a Community around Your Project

Growing a social network around a software project brings developers up to speed faster. New hires and teams that are added to a core team will find all the information they need in a central Lotus Connections community, including blogs, forums, wikis, file repositories, and bookmarks. These collaboration systems offer a broad teamwork base for any software project. For example, wikis can hold product specifications, blogs can be used to publish roadmaps to a wider audience, forums can be used to gather feedback from beta testers, and a file repository hosts nightly builds with download statistics and commentary features.

Creating a new Lotus Connections community, or linking to an existing one, only takes a couple of clicks. The administrator sets the Lotus Connections community in the Social Network tab under project management.

Once the project community is created, all project members are added to it and as new developers join the project, they automatically become members of the project community.

Lotus knows Howard Stern

Dave Johnson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:34:33 +0000

It's cool and just a little weird at the same time to see IBM's social/collab software offerings get some praise from Jeff Jarvis via the Howard Stern show and "Howard's geek guru, IBM's Jeff Schick."

Jeff Jarvis: Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I’ll concede: It’s impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected.

Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.

...just noticed that Ed Brill has a post w/comments on this same topic: Have you been following the "why does Howard Stern use Notes" discussion?.

The Jazz Connection

Dave Johnson — Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:25:58 +0000

Here's something I've been closely involved with during my entire IBM career (almost 9 months now): making software development more social by integrating Rational Team Concert and Lotus Connections.

In case you don't know, Team Concert is Rational's "complete agile collaborative development environment" with integrated source code control, issue tracking, build management and very slick Eclipse and web-based client UIs -- it's a collaborative environment for software developers. Lotus Connections is IBM's comprehensive social software suite with blogs (Roller based!), wikis, social bookmarking, forums, file sharing, social networking and more -- an environment for more general collaboration.

IBM partner Mainsoft has developed an integration between Team Concert and Connections and it's now available as a tech preview. The product makes it easy for developers to hook a a software development project up to a Lotus Connections and enable software developers to collaborate with the much wider community of folks involved with a software project including end users, subject matter experts, executives and other stakeholders. As you can see from the list of features, it's a pretty tight integration.

If you want to learn more about the integration, check out the links I referenced above. There's also a short podcast available at Developer Works and there will be sessions at Lotusphere 2010 this month and (with luck) at Rational's Innovate 2010 Conference in June.

Latest Links: August 11, 2009

Dave Johnson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:12:00 +0000

Your blog still loves you
"it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet."
ZDNet Asia: 'Ferociously loyal' users to stand by Sun
"47,000 enterprise customers and a ferociously loyal customer base"
The Connections Blog: Full house! Lotus Connections 2.5 video demos
screen-casts for 8 of the Lotus Connections components
Chromium Blog: Google Chrome Developer Tools for Eclipse Users
"Set breakpoints, inspect variables and evaluate expressions from within Eclipse"
First impressions of Google Wave | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
"won't be ejecting existing enterprise collab tools from the workplace any time soon"
Shindig-based OpenSocial Container from Lockheed Martin
"written in Java and is based on open source projects such as GWT, Hibernate..."

First impressions

Dave Johnson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:10:58 +0000

I've been at IBM for one month now and I'm just now starting to settle in and make some progress. I'm going to try to work some blogging back into my schedule and tell you about what I'm doing at work. For starters, here's a quick summary of my first impressions.

People

I'm working in IBM's Rational division, home of software development tools from compilers and SCM systems to UML modeling tools and IDEs. The developers I've met in person here have been smart, mostly young and very web savvy folk working on Jazz and emerging technologies.

I've been pretty happy to find the same culture of transparency that I found at Sun, at least in the groups I've interacted with. The Jazz team shares everything via blogs, wikis, makes source control and issue tracking available to the public even though it is not an open source project. I've found IBM's centrally hosted internal blogs, social bookmarking and community sites, many of which are powered by Lotus Connections, to be really useful. So far, the "corporate culture" isn't really all that different than what I saw in Sun, but I've only been here a month.

Software

All of the software I use on a daily basis has changed. I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe. I'm using Lotus Notes for email, calendar and SameTime instant messaging instead of Mac Mail, Calendar and GTalk. I'm using Eclipse and Websphere instead of Netbeans and Glassfish, DB2 instead of MySQL and blogging with Lotus Connections instead of plain old Roller. I'm adjusting pretty well I think; took me about a month. I've heard lots of complaints about Notes in IBM and elsewhere, but it is nice to have everybody hooked into integrated mail, calendar and instant messaging. At Sun everybody seemed to be using a slightly different set of communication tools.

My first assignments involve Jazz (see also From the Eclipse Platform to Jazz), which is new architecture and foundation for Rational's product line. Rational Team Concert (RTC) and two other products so far are built on Jazz which provides a repository, source code control, integrated bug tracking as well as infrastructure for RESTful web services interfaces and an Ajax-based clients ends. The Web UI and the Eclipse UI are great and that's what makes RTC a pleasure to use. And unlike pretty much every other piece of software I've dealt with here Jazz is very easy to install.

The Jazz internals are pretty interesting too and another alternate universe for me. The architecture is basically the Eclipse plugin architecture, powered by the Equinox OSGi container and running in Eclipse, in a Servlet Container and in the browser. The whole system is made up of OSGi bundles and each bundle is also an Eclipse plugin. This is true for the Java code and the Dojo-powered JavaScript code in the web-client because Jazz includes the necessary infrastructure for JavaScript OSGi bundles. I've got to become an expert on this stuff, and fast.

Office

Big changes here as well. I've been working from home for almost 5 years so it's great to have local co-workers and an office. IBM has a couple of huge complexes in the Research Triangle Park (RTP), which is about a 20 minute drive for me. The building I'm in is basically a giant cube farm, but it's modern, set in the woods with lots of windows and the cubes are very nice, as cubes go. The cafeteria is reasonable and about like the one at Sun's California campuses. Much of the Jazz team works here in RTP, which is convenient for me, but my immediate co-workers on the CTO team are scattered around the country. Like Sun, most folks seem to do a mix of office and work-from-home and I'm doing the same.

You can probably tell already that I like the job a lot and I haven't even told you what I'm working on yet. I'll have to start telling you about that in a later post.