Apr 17, 2014

First release of the Optimal Sync application/script - 0.8!

 

Tagline(s):

What? Sales department saving their contacts in an excel sheet? You want their edits maintained in the CRM database? Do you regularly want to download a data set from a table in a web page? And transform the data a little before you insert it?

It's out!

Optimal Sync is a small and simple multi-platform(well soon) BPM utility that is able to move and affect data between different many sources and destinations.
As it is dependent on Python 3.3 and just recently released open source software packages, it requires at least Debian "Jessie" or Ubuntu 13.04. It will however stay with stable releases after its initial release. 0.9 will mean a tested Windows version and 1.0 OS X.
That needs to be restated, this is a first release, so there are some quirks. However the ambitions are high and there is an aggressive release schedule ahead.
Please try it out and don't hesitate to report any issues as tickets here at the project page and you'll get a response.
(The GUI is "ugly"? Well, please share how to make it prettier!)
Download packages at Sourceforge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/optimalbpm/files/Optimal%20BPM%20tools/
Install QAL before Optimal Sync:
http://www.optimalbpm.se/wiki/index.php/Optimal_Sync#From%20packages
More documentation at:
http://www.optimalbpm.se/wiki/index.php/Optimal_Sync

And phew.

The above is obviously a quote from the Sourceforge blog post.
So finally something actually installable and runnable has emerged from all this experimenting and fiddling around. Saying it is a cool application is perhaps not the right word, the GUI is very much leaning towards "functional" and leaning away from "aesthetic".

BUT, it is all open source, and it uses the latest libraries available. In fact, so new are they, that this could not have been released a month ago. There will now be a consolidation phase where only the application and QAL will evolve as the underlying libraries goes into stabler repositories. Cool stuff will be added indeed, when all the technical hurdles has been cleared.

Anyway, happiness abound!

Happy Easter!

Apr 9, 2014

Simple replicator


The first thing coming out of the Optimal BPM project will be the 0.8 version of a tool called Simple Replicator. The Business Process Management angle is that transfer and transformation of data is a fundamental part of BPM. Also, the simple replicator is just that, simple. It just scratches the surface of what is possible to do with QAL.

I'll begin with Debian, then Windows and Redhat(v 0.9), Mac OS X (1.0) packages, But if you just can't wait for .deb packages, you can try out the source already, it will not change much until release:
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/optimalbpm/code optimalbpm-code



However, in most situations you don't have to join rows from a webpage HTML tag tree with rows from a RDBMS with those of a .csv file. So that is what "simple" means.
The full potential of QAL and Optimal BPM will instead be managed in a web-based interface. If you want to se examples of what QAL can do, look at the the unit tests. Information about  manual installation is on the wiki, see below.

I have already started using the ticket system at Sourceforge to track some of the development, it works ok for that purpose, however, and of course, it is not near what bugzilla and other bugtrackers can provide, but will suffice for now. You can view and add tickets here. All questions are welcome.

There is also the beginning of a wiki brewing. So far there is only an article about QAL's database abstraction layer and the Optimal BPM tool Simple Replicator

Cheers!