A case study of developing RIA for both web and desktop application by using Adobe solutions: RIA/Flex.

In our last project, we faced 2 challenges of how to build the SaaS platform including various modules; some are developed by ourselves and some are third parties (Forum, Wiki, Mail, etc.). With third-parties, we limit modifying their code base and database schema due to client’s requirements. Here are our challenges:

Challenge 1: When a new user is registered, some our modules need to acknowledge and have re-actions. For example:

Document Management module creates a personal document workspace for that user.
Calendar module creates a personal calendar for that user.
Forum and Wiki register that user to their user database because Engroup supports Single Sign On (SSO) mechanism. That means any user registered to Engroup user database can access Forum and Wiki resources without registering their user database.
Since our application follows SaaS model, the modules acknowledging and having re-actions to that registered user are dynamically discovered at runtime. This prohibits us from invoking module API in static manner.

Challenge 2: We want to implement audit trail process. Each module installed into our platform must follow the rules of tracking our user activities. Our goal is to build a common API sending user activities to reporting server but all our modules must loose coupling with the reporting API. This design helps us to configure reporting server in different machines easily.

eSoftHead is pleased to inform that Engroup 1.5 M1 of our Java/AIR groupware product has been release. You can download it at http://esofthead.com/node/25.
According to the Engroup 1.5 roadmap posted at http://blog.esofthead.com/engroup-15-roadmap/, the new features of Engroup 1.5 M1 are as follows:

Upload single/multiple contents.
Download single/multiple contents.
Categorize contents via document type, status, and tag.
Display simple transaction view.