Introducing Singleshot

[Assaf Arkin <ar...@intalio.com>]

We wrapped up the Intalio User Conference yesterday.  I was told to
present, but not what, so I picked up three projects I'm personally
excited to see happen.  RESTful BPEL, Simpel and Singleshot.

Since the audience wasn't particularly technical, I didn't get to talk
shop and there wasn't much there that would news to you.  But I did
get to demo Singleshot with some catching screen shots, and I want to
share that part of the presentation with you.

  http://people.apache.org/~assaf/Singleshot_Intalio_User_Conf.pdf

Singleshot is a task manager.  A task manager tracks people and tasks.
 It tells you which task you should be doing, which tasks you should
be doing, and let's you track other people's task that are of interest
to you.  A task manager is a really simple application, but not all
task managers are simple to use applications.

So Singleshot started from asking the question "what can we do
better?"  And as I thought about it, I ended up with three
requirements.

Requirement #1: Build a task manager that people can use.  A task
manager is a productivity application.  Productivity applications
should help you get the work done, but stay out of the way.   You
don't get more work done by using complex UIs full of forms and
controls and other administrative debris.  So really important
requirement is getting the user experience right.

Requirement #2: Build a task manager that people will use.  People
have different ways of managing their workload.  Everyone I showed the
demo to loved the UI.  Still, some people manage their day from the
inbox, they'll want to do everything via e-mail.  Others live in the
calendar, so that would be a way to put tasks in front of them.  I
personally use feed readers a lot.  And why not IM?  So the second
requirement is about making tasks accessible from different
applications and even devices.

Requirement #3: Build a task manager that developers can use.  That's
often a conflicting requirement, some developers love complex
architectures, other prefer to keep it simple.  So for now, we're
going with simple.  But clearly we can't all agree on using a single
tool or platform.  You might be build a PHP application that needs
task management, or starting tasks from a BPEL process.  You may want
a JavaScript widget that shows tasks in a portal, or fancy Flash
animation.  Maybe you want to script it with Python, or run some
management tasks from Perl scripts.  Basically we want something that
can be used anywhere without forcing heavy infrastructure or platforms
on developers.

Code speaks better than any PowerPoint presentation, and we've got
enough code to run a full demo and show these concepts in action. I
think it's time to roll up the sleeves and turn this into a working,
kick-ass task manager.

You can check out the code from
  http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ode/sandbox/singleshot

For the Git inclined:
  git://github.com/Assaf/singleshot.git

I'm sure that won't come as a surprise, this is all built on Rails
2.1, so you'll need that installed first.  The README file has more
setup instructions.

Assaf