Last week we presented a review of the implementation of the Curl eyeDecide application to Jeffrey Hammond at Forrester.  I have posted the presentation here.

Presenting were Doug Mcrae and John Chisholm (Cheese) from Curl and Juhan Sonin from Involution Studios.

As a developer himself, I think Jeffery enjoyed hearing from the people who actually did the work.  I'm sure most of his days as an analyst are filled with discussion of trends and features rather actual design and coding techniques.

Curl eyeDecide was a team effort between Curl and Involution Studios, a top application UI design firm.  The complete team included Juhan from Involution and Doug and Cheese from Curl. It took 6 months from conception to press release that included 4 months of implementation.  That amounted to 30 work weeks and resulted in 20K lines of code.

The development cycle was collaborative and iterative and featured Curl's ability to code and deploy with a total of 50 distinct releases. The development started with connectivity to the data and the UI design was driven by the actual user experience of the testers at each release.

Some key learnings were that design and development should occur over the life of the project in an iterative cycle.  Additionally professional graphic and UI design matters and having Juhan involved in developing not only the looks but the user experience from the beginning was paramount.   Another important lesson is to clearly understand the data, its values and what people will want to do early in the process.

You can get the complete eyeDecide application in source form here.

In a previous article I discussed three areas of business savings to examine when making the Business case for Entperise RIA. This article will examine how Panasonic realized those business savings with their RIA implementation.

Panasonic Voice of the Engineer (VOE)

Aiming to become the number one company worldwide in customer satisfaction, Panasonic is one of the world's most-recognized brand names, largely on the basis of its highly successful Panasonic AVC Networks business segment.

The division manufactures and markets the majority of the company's consumer products, including plasma TVs and LCD monitors, Blu-ray and DVD players, digital cameras, video recorders, home theater systems and many other products. But while Panasonic welcomes strong sales, the reality is that the more diverse and successful its product lines become, the greater the challenge for its service department becomes.

Panasonic AVC's service division has simple objectives: discover and respond to potential quality and safety issues as early as possible in the product lifecycle. And, from the standpoint of safety, ensure absolutely safe operation of all electrical products over the long term. Sounds simple enough, but with an evolving product line that gets ever more complex, Panasonic service technicians have to continually educate themselves on new technologies and new repair techniques. But while it is critical that Panasonic technicians stay up to date with the latest technology improvements and developments, how do you make that happen for a huge global workforce that is responsible for thousands of products and product parts?

Panasonic AVC approaches this challenge through what it calls the Voice Of Engineering (VOE). An enterprise-wide program, VOE encompasses all the initiatives and activities geared toward discovering potential critical issues in product quality by sharing and analyzing information and trends. This includes an ongoing dialog between service technicians in the field and company management to uncover potential quality issues, and nurture and advance repair and servicing capabilities in the field. The company's technological approach to its service challenges was to create an automated system built on the Curl platform to provide its service and support staff with up-to-date repair manuals, parts diagrams, specification sheets, and other kinds of documentation.

Originally launched in 2005, the Service Information Sharing System also allows support technicians and engineers to:

• Use forums and comment areas to share their knowledge of new repair techniques, describe repair cases and support a higher level of customer service across the entire organization
• Through Curl, view information using a variety of methods: graphs, tables, charts with multi-layout format, etc.
• Integrate external document and data formats - Excel, PDF, etc.
• Easily operate system functions using drag-and-drop features, data filtering and graph combining

High Performance and Data Visualization

Panasonic AVC Networks chose Curl as the development platform for its Service Information Sharing System because it provides the ideal environment for live documentation and interactive education. Initially Panasonic AVC used a database application as its service support information system.

Another advantage of the Curl-powered Service Information Sharing System is that it enabled Panasonic AVC to retain the comprehensive information storage capabilities of its existing database system, yet enhance the capabilities of that system with a powerful and flexible front end. Curl makes complicated screen controls possible, surpassing ordinary Web browser capabilities, so Panasonic developers built in the kind of advanced features and functions typically found only in client-server type applications. For instance, the Panasonic system enables users to view documents and related information in a single view. To access documents and files, users browse indexes or use keyword search.

In practice, field engineers and service technicians simply type in keywords, and then narrow down their selections out of the returned list screen. This powerful search tool provides Panasonic field engineers with instant access to the vast amount of repair documentation and related information across the company. VOE Search structures information using syntactic analysis, morphologic analysis and a dictionary tool (tautology or synonym), and displays the associated information ranked against the keyword. The application draws on documents, files and associated information from several databases. The interface supports analytic tools that allow the support engineer to drag a device and drop it into a chart to render an instant analysis of part failures over time giving him an immediate view into likely problems. This level of performance and data visualization saves considerable time and contributes to greatly improved productivity.

Main functionality includes search for repair parts or technical documents, as well as bulletin boards to share the information and analysis views of repair processes. These discussion boards enable users to ask questions and get answers from colleagues and associates around the world. All correspondences on the bulletin board are searchable so it can be listed by the search. As engineers use the application, know-how or information are accumulated organically to speed the maintenance of information.

Low Support Costs - Web Delivery

Despite delivering native client performance and visualization the VOE application is delivered over the web. Curl supports client side data store, which allows the application high performance search without costly round trips to the server. Furthermore, through web delivery application support, costs are considerably lower. With Curl's flexible file-handling properties and standard APIs for external applications, documents can be viewed right within the system interface - there's no need to open new applications such as Excel or Acrobat. In addition, Curl's elastic technology allows users to adjust the size of documents as appropriate. Operations for changing chart type, targeting parts on and off, displaying above or below a certain point, were all designed and implemented to make the interface intuitive and convenient. Further, the application provides a "Repair Trend" view, primarily used by management, which enables them to track service activity by product, product category and date (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.) to better understand service issues and uncover potential problems.

One thing I have always liked about Curl is the lack of an independent compile/link step. You can run Curl applets directly from source code just using the Curl RTE, which will compile and link the code dynamically as needed. This gives Curl the immediacy and flexibility of scripting languages like JavaScript while retaining the performance of a compiled language. It also means that you can run Curl applets directly from a source code repository with a web interface that can be configured to return the appropriate Curl applet MIME type (text/vnd.curl). Luckily for me, Google Code provides such a repository, so I am able to configure applets in my ZUZU libraries to be run directly from the repository.

Here is an example:

http://zuzu-curl.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/zuzu-curl/LIB/applets/example.curl

(I don't know how to embed an OBJECT tag in this blog infrastructure. See

the version of this post on the Zuzu Curl blog to see an embedded example.)

This example applet takes arguments in the "query" portion of the URL to set the title of the example and to load the initial contents of the example either from another file or from the query itself (as in this case). This allows me to use the same example applet to show different editable examples in my blog. The embedded example applet used in the training section of the Curl Developer's Site uses the same trick; for example, see here.

Look here for instructions on how to configure your Google Code repository to serve Curl applets.  This trick may work on other Subversion-based code hosting services such as SourceForge, but I have not tried it.