Espresso, as its name suggests, is a lighter
version of its parent system Cappuccino
which is a full-fledged online shop written
in Java. Cappuccino due to its high-end
technical design had shortcomings in terms
of usability. Additionally, due to the design
being tightly coupled with heavy database
operations, Cappuccino offered poor operational
speeds. These shortcomings called for an
improved version of the online shop, a version
that would be fairly simple for the end-user
as also be fine-tuned in terms of speed
and performance parameters.
The above mentioned requirements formed
the basis of Espresso’s design. Its
implementation included a subset of features
from Cappuccino. What Espresso offered was
a simple but intuitive user interface which
naturally improved the usability of the
system. On the speed and performance front,
it offered faster load and search times.
Since heavy database operations on the
earlier system acted as speed bottlenecks,
Espresso’s design eliminated the use
of any database system. Instead flat formatted
text files (.csv) were used to store data
in a specific data structure. The Java applet
would read data from these files at load
time. Corresponding to data tables, multiple
files were used that stored related data
individually.
Other features of Espresso included a search
engine to find an item on the shop and an
E-mail module that sent order reports to
the customer and the shop-owner in the form
of mail alerts. This system was designed
to run on both Internet Explorer and Netscape
Navigator.
Given the simple design of this system,
it involved a small team of 2 developers,
one QA and a single manager, and the development
phase was completed in one month flat. Espresso
has been ADI’s most early experiences
with web based Java technologies and it
certainly has added to our light application
development experiences. |
