Hurdles

Today was the second day of our sprint. Lisa and I had decided on Friday that we were going to divide the task by experimenting with the two options we've had from our research. Lisa did the research on Pentaho BI suite, so she went on with it. Meanwhile I had started some research on Adobe Flex, and am trying to get a demo showing code coverage retrieved from the database. On Friday, we started installing the two tools/framework. Lisa had some troubles after the installation; the installation was a success, but when she had some errors when trying to log in to the admin console. The error message was complaining about not finding a repository, but in fact the database (mysql) was installed along with the full package, and the repository was indeed created. We were not sure what caused the error, but Lisa tried to overcome this problem by editing some of the files within the server directory (according to some troubleshooting research she did), but did not solve the problem, so she decided to start a clean slate by removing the whole suite all over again. Meanwhile, I had no problems with installation, so I went directly to follow some tutorials. After getting some insights of how Flex works, I started to create my own project for the demo. However, I'm having a problem connecting the Flex project to a datasource. Initially I imagined it would just a matter of setting up jdbc url on the project in Eclipse (based on my experience setting up a datasource on WebSphere Application Server and developing data services portlets). However, this is not the case with Flex. According to my research, Flex applications do not connect directly to a data source, but they communicate through several options:
mxml - Java Server Pages
mxml - PHP
mxml - ColdFusion
HTTP services in action script

Today, I was informed that I actually can try out Flex 3 builder. So I started the day by installing Flex 3 builder (I installed Flex 2 on Friday) and played around with some tutorials. I also did some try outs connecting to the datasource from Sonar (the dummy data created for our starting point), but so far the efforts have been fruitless. On the other side, Lisa had started the day by re-installing the Pentaho BI suite, this time just taking all the default installation values. And fortunately this had solved the previous problem and she was able to get into the first page and the admin console of Pentaho as well as the JBoss portal server that was included in the installation suit. So currently Lisa is researching how to create her own portlets and display the code coverage by connecting to the Sonar database. I reckon if we sort out the datasource connection problem, things are going to get back in track, even better, I reckon its gonna get exciting.. By the way.. i just had a good news from back home, Jakarta: my sister had just delivered her first baby a couple of hours ago :D Its both exciting and scary! 'cause besides the fact that I'm an uncle now, it got me realized that I'm an adult and am getting older and older each day!. Anyhow, despite all the stress facing dead ends and errors at work, it was a very happy day for me after all.