I’ve never heard of Elizabeth Gilbert before.. but through a happy series of links, including Olga Nunes blog (someone else I’d never heard of before, but find myself so incredibly moved by) I came across this from the last TED talks:

This notion of creativity coming from without, as a “genius” that visits us when we work, isn’t completely irreconcilable to a humanist like myself.

Whether it’s writing, making music or even crafting code; we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And it doesn’t matter if we call the well-spring of our creativity God, our cultural heritage or the people we connect to, it feels natural and rational to acknowledge an external source – a “genius” living in the walls of our lives.

I’m not religious in any sense – I’m firmly convinced that I just don’t know – but I can accept that I don’t own the ideas and forces that inform my creative life. The transformation of these forces into something new may be peculiar to me, but the source is elsewhere.

The objective of the Seamus project is to build a requirements management system in Ruby. Seamus takes a document-centric approach to requirements – treating requirements as “content” to be managed within an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.

There are a couple of reasons for doing this and for doing it this way. Firstly I want to improve my Ruby skills – in my day job I work mostly in Rails and want to go a bit deeper into Ruby than website development typically requires. Building an ECM isn’t a trivial exercise – I’m not even confident I can do it, at least not on my own. Going through the process of building this system is going to teach me more about Ruby than I’m used to – as well as give me a chance to flex those architecture and design muscles that have atrophied over the past few years.

Secondly I want to build a requirements management tool that is useful to a broad set of stake holders. Most tools or systems I’ve seen for managing requirements tend to support the needs of one group of users over another – e.g. satisfy a business’s legal needs but fall short of guiding the day-to-day efforts of developers, or vice versa. The ECM will provide multiple representations of the same underlying content – allowing the same set of requirements to be used by different groups of people working on the same project.

There’s a third ancillary reason: to learn more about the process of requirements management. And a fourth “nice to have” – that building a specific-purpose ECM will lead to a system that can be repurposed for the management of other types of content. Neither of these are driving reasons for the project, but will be kept in mind as we go.

I’m in a bit of quandary over how to jump-start the project. In an earlier post I said I wasn’t going to start until I had a full set of requirements. I’m being guided by Karl Wiegers excellent More About Software Requirements, in which Karl suggests defining a baseline set of requirements and then engaging in a iterative process for further refining the needs of the project (he’s clearly not adverse to agile methodologies). Given I already have part of the problem domain laid out for me – in the structure of the CMIS data model – I’m inclined to lay down a very brief set of requirements and then use the model to explore how these requirements can be mapped into the ECM domain.

I plan on documenting what I do as much as possible, so I have a record of what mistakes I make – both in terms of technical choices and also the actual approach. I have to say, as a developer I’m just keen to start cutting some code.

Adios Rails-as-CMS

The vast majority of traffic that comes to this website is generated by interest in the Rails-as-CMS post made over a year ago. While the attention is appreciated, it feels like this particular meme has run its course – at least for me.

Gaspard Bucher’s post Is Rails a CMS? puts paid to the Rails-as-CMS argument for most CMS implementations. I don’t buy his argument completely – for instance, you lose as much if not more flexibility by adopting the constraints of Gaspard’s Xena, Radiant or any of the other Rails-based CMSs out there. But I get where he is coming from – in general you are probably going to be better off embracing an existing package and extending it to meet your own needs.

The Rails-as-CMS idea still holds some interest for me – and probably for a few other Rubyists – because it allows for experimenting outside of the general case. My own need for a suitable vehicle for publishing some of my writing online is very different to what most people are looking for in a CMS. I accept that, and I’ve probably going a bit further by dropping Rails altogether for This Purple World and moving to Sintra. The results at the moment are pretty uninspiring, but once I get a moment to clean it up and post a more recent version on Github you can probably expect to see a new “Sinatra-as-CMS” argument start to brew. :)

Hola Seamus

With Rails-as-CMS out of the way – or at least on hold – I’d like to focus my energies back on a project I began a long time ago. Seamus started out as an implementation of the Content Mangement Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. CMIS is about as far away from CMS as you can possibly imagine, despite the common “C for content” in their respective acronyms. CMIS belongs to the world of Enterprise Content Management systems – an evolution of the document- and record-management systems of yore. There are plenty of players in this market, from IBM and Microsoft with their proprietary offerings across to open source providers like Nuxeo and Alfresco. Most of the big players – including Nuxeo and Alfresco – have signed up to support CMIS in their products.

With the original incarnation of Seamus I managed to get a very basic implementation of CMIS version 0.5 going but was stymied by (a) spending way too much time trying to get my head around the way CMIS uses the Atom Publishing Protocol and REST and (b) having nothing real to wrap the system around.

I’m avoiding the hitting the same problems with Atom PP this time around by effectively ignoring the CMIS service model – instead using its domain model as inspiration and assuming that exposing the the system via a Atom/REST or SOAP interface should be relatively trivial, providing I stay close to the specification’s domain model.

The new implementation of Seamus will attempt to stay “real” by concentrating on a single problem domain – specifically the area of requirements management. Requirements are documents like any other – they have workflows associated with them, need to be maintained, versioned, distributed and so forth in a controlled manner. I’m imagining bootstrapping Seamus by using it to maintain its own requirements, thereby proving the system and creating a useful document set at the same time. And if Seamus can be used to satisfactorily manage requirements it may very well be extended to handle other types of documents.

I won’t be writing a single line of code until I have a clear baseline set of requirements ready. I know – a very “enterprisey” approach, but one I hope will pay off. I don’t have any high hopes for Seamus, other than what I expect to learn along the way. But it’s going to be an interesting journey, I hope.