Blog

Validation by Convention: A brief introduction

By Josh Arnold on August 9, 2010
The ProAce team has been a little quiet lately. It’s not that we’ve decided to be anti-social, we’ve just been working on some new ideas, keeping busy with new projects, and getting ready for something big. Somehow in the midst of all of this, we’ve managed to visit one of the pains we always feel when approaching a new project: validation.
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Drupal Primer: A CMS For All Reasons

By Christopher Mitchell on July 13, 2010

I love Drupal. My first exposure to the platform was four years ago, when I was seeking a CMS solution that would allow me to rapidly prototype small business websites without having to reinvent the wheel. After experimenting with Joomla…

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FubuMVC keeps you DRY – Leveraging Conventions

By Josh Arnold on June 4, 2010
With that convention in place, enabling details screens is as simple as creating the model classes and dropping them in their respective namespaces. Not only does that save a lot of time, it also removes the need to repeating yourself for every entity.
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A Weekend Getaway

By Josh Arnold on May 6, 2010
One of the mistakes we make as software enthusiasts is getting too involved in work and not making time to step back and clear our heads. It may be an immediate upcoming deadline or maybe we’re going heads down to try to avoid the “crunch time” syndrome. Either way, I think we all know it’s important to take some time off.
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Setting real expectations for custom software development

By Dugan Trevathan on April 26, 2010
Setting expectations around the business objectives of a software development project can prevent misunderstandings.

Setting expectations early and often for software development
helps everyone envision the final product.

Often we hear of failed projects that either didn’t hit their intended timeline or budget or didn’t even come close to meeting user expectations. If you’ve been involved in or around any custom software development as the vendor or customer, then most likely you have been privy to some very misunderstood expectations from both sides of the fence. On the customer’s side, their expectations seem simple. Deliver what I ask, when and for how much you said you could. From the developer’s perspective it can be a slippery slope if not properly thought out and estimations aren’t effectively communicated.
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SXSW Interactive 2010 highlights

By Dustin on April 13, 2010
SXSWi 2010 Highlights

Photo credit: Flickr/Brianfit / CC BY 2.0

We had a great time attending South by Southwest Interactive 2010. From the panels and workshops full of industry heroes, to adventures amongst the geek takeover of 6th Street at night (including being accidentally engulfed in the mob swarming über-Tweeter Ashton Kutcher at the Microsoft party), having 14,000 Interactive people in your city brings a sense of importance and community to the projects we work on.

Here’s a quick recap of some of favorite talks from this year’s conference. You can also check out the SXSW presentation slides available on SlideShare and SXSW’s video channel for more information.

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Hospital efficiency takes flight

By Victoria Dawson on March 30, 2010
Airport terminal display and hospital efficiency

Photo credit: Flickr/hyougushi / CC BY-SA 2.0

Modern hospitals and airports have many things in common: 1) both hinge on moving individuals through a complex organization thousands of times per week; 2) both are places where we don’t want to spend our extra time and 3) both revolve around tightly scheduled systems – flights or operations – that, unfortunately, tend to run behind. In other words, they are all about efficiency… or the lack thereof. However in the health care world, some new ideas are about to take off.
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Communicating Domain Models with Object-Role Modeling

By Josh Arnold on March 9, 2010
As I mentioned in my previous post, the ProAce team headed to ADNUG yesterday to speak about communicating domain models. While the talk was centered around the use of Object-Role Modeling (ORM) to accomplish this, I was really interested in hearing what others are doing in this area. One of the greatest things about our industry is the community that makes it possible. I’m a pretty big fan of the idea that there’s always a better way to do things and the idea of communicating models is something that seems to be neglected. It’s quite possible that I’m missing something huge that the community is doing. One of my goals for our talk last night was to start a dialog in this area.
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Speaking at the Austin .NET User Group

By Josh Arnold on March 8, 2010
The ProAce team is heading to the Austin .NET User Group this evening to speak about Communicating Domain Models using Object-Role Modeling (ORM). We'll be presenting a culmination of our recent blog posts and will also dive into some of the details of using ORM.
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External Uniqueness Constraints

By Mike Weinand on March 4, 2010

External uniqueness constraints are very closely related to internal uniqueness constraints.  The difference is external uniqueness constraints span multiple roles instead of just one.  Since the concept isn’t too big of a stretch we’re going…

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