Our first Open Space session

Our first Open Space session was held on the 15th of September 2008. As you may have read, our internal RAD race is on the 26th and 27th of September. One of the open space subjects was how you can prepare yourself for the RAD race. This was the outcome:

• Preparation is the most important thing


• Database setup


• E-mail client/server


• Styling


• Authentication/Authorization module


• Print module


• Payment module


• Code generation


• Books, pdf’s


• Source Control System


• Networking equipment


• Working hardware


• Report generator

As you can see there is a lot you can do to prepare yourself for the RAD race. What is your opinion about the preparation for a Rapid Application Development race?

Internal QNH Rad Race 2008

26th and 27th of September, our company organizes the second internal Rad (Rapid Application Development) race. A Rad race is a competition in which several teams compete against each other to build an application in 1.5 days. The team which completes the most functionality wins. The teams consist of two people which work together and are responsible for creating their own development environment including version control, choice of IDE etc. They also choose their own technology to build the application in. It is your own responsibility to choose a technology you are familiar with. The technology we use to build the application is Grails and IntelliJ as our IDE. We find the Grails framework (and Groovy) very productive and a pleasure to work with (which is partly due to IntelliJ, one of the best IDE’s I have worked with).

The competition is tough though. There are 12 other teams which use the following technology:

• PHP / Ruby on Rails


• .NET


• Oracle / APEX


• Flex, Spring


• Spring MVC


• GWT, Spring and Hibernate


• Wicket, Spring and Hibernate

Although several factors come into play which determine who is the winner, it is nice to see the pros and cons of each technology during the competition.

We will keep you updated!