OVW Meeting 5

The next open virtual world meeting will take place next monday @ Bar Knut, Ottensen 18:00 h.

Topics:

• Current developments
• Roadmap
• License
• Idea exchange

Place: Cafe Bar Knut, Ottensen 22765, Hamburg, Germany
Date: Monday, 21.12.2009, 18:00 MET

Come join us.
It is open for everyone, devs, users, donators, press...

Thoughts on Testing

While programming we write extensive tests. Tests are extra program code, which checks many functions. Basically every piece of code must be tested and be testable all the time. This is the programmers way to make sure, that a complex program works, even if things change over time.

The new client has now more than 100 test functions, each checking a group of functions. The upcoming portal just reached 50. Both are growing quickly with the number of feature blocks in the code. Sometimes we spend complete days writing tests. This sounds much, but it is worth the time, because tests easily spare much time later that would be spent debugging. Writing so much test code is a part of agile development.

Read more about testing on my blog

Donations Status & Upcoming Release

Dear Reader, this is a quick update on the donations status and the upcoming first release we are working on heavily.

The good news first: to the left you can see a sreenshot of the chat software we will publish soon. We are coding the last lines and have to integrate the software into the new installer. Surely some polishing has to be done but now we can see the end of the tunnel.

And now the very good news. You reached goal 1 for this quarter! We are thankful and proud. But that does not mean the project does not need your donations anymore. Keep up the good spirit and do not forget to grab a copy of Adobe AIR, so you can use our our little program.

Working on an Installer

We are currently working on an installer program. We were very happy with the weblin installer, which is a small EXE and downloads a separate ZIP file. We aim for a similar design. It might not do automatic updates in the first version, but we are currently laying the foundations for it.

Tell us if you have suggestions or experiences with the old installer you want to share. Now is the time to improve things.

Database Technology for the new Web Site

In the next months, the OVW web site will grow. When we add items, it will be an item trading platform. Later it will grow into a serious social network web site with all the "Send message", friends, feed, etc. We do not know yet how far we program our own stuff or if we use external services. After all, there are already enough social networks. Anyway there will be much traffic on the Web site.

From weblin we learned, that there will be millions of users. Weblin had up to 27.000 concurrent connections with more than 10.000 of them browsing the web, chatting and trading at the same time. We must make sure, that the web site works for 10.000s of concurrent users, because the weblin numbers are surely not the end.

Parallel to the client we already work on a the server/backend code. It will be just the necessary stuff to let the client run for you without much registration. But it is the foundation for all parts of the web site which will be added later.

I just posted an article on my blog about the database design for the upcoming OVW web site and item platform.

Get Ready for the First Release

We are working hard to finish the first version of our "chat browser" but there is something you can do while you are waiting:

Please download Adobe AIR and install it. AIR will be necessary to run our software. It is widely used and perhaps you already have it installed, so do not worry that it might harm your beloved computer.

I added an AIR download link to the sidebar. Just follow that link and you will get more information about AIR in your preferred language.

Goal-o-meter

There is now a picture from Google Docs available, which shows how much of the Donations Goal 2 is already achieved:

% of Goal 2 Reached: