CardMeeting Dispatch

Helloooooo CardMeeting ppl,

The network is starting to resemble the harmonious flow of data I have always believed was possible.

Over the Easter weekend, I found myself drawn into a tuning effort that centered around network traffic going into and out of meetings. In the process I found many bugs that related to huge packets killing connections, rendering problems, and even a potential data loss bug due to a framing issue I found!

I got the build wrapped up and tested tonite and the build I just placed on the server is looking good. I don't see any more random "radio tower" warning icons, there's no more bizarro CPU spikes on the servers, no more crazy packet storms. Best of all, the traffic when nothing is going on (which is like 99% of the time), is almost nothing... In the past, the server and clients were constantly chatting, and it strained my limited bandwidth even when every meeting was idle! It all just "feels" more solid now. I know better than to claim the thing is bugfree, but it sure is better behaved than it was last week.

All this means CardMeeting can now host more users, I'm hoping you all can get the word out and make the login roles swell a bit more. I'd like to stress the server out more and see what the new limits are.

Please give what I've got up there a whirl, and then please let me know, good or bad, what your experiences are with this build.

Thanks for using CardMeeting,
Dave Woldrich
dave@woldrich.com

Hi there CardMeeting users,

I've deployed a CardMeeting build for the first time in over a month, and the new documents I have included can help you unlock the hidden powers of CardMeeting for your team!

So, I have to apologize for disappearing there in February and for the regular server outages that occurred for the first half of the month. It turns out that my web server had a DIMM that had gone south on us, and it was regularly causing chaos for the OS and Java. The ram has been replaced, and ever since the box has been very well-behaved, needing no attendance and giving spotless service.

Please bear in mind that the work I'm doing now on CardMeeting mostly relates to improving scalability and availability. The infrastructure I have now may be brittle, but what I am working towards surely will not be. So, just hang with me here, and we'll get this thing straightened out...

Anyhow, around the latter part of February, user Ben tipped me off to some errors in my web service code and my 3rd party integrations documentation. When I undertook the effort to fix those bugs and upgrade the docs, I realized that I had much more to say on the matter of how users and third-party developers can integrate with CardMeeting and move their data into and out of it.

So, I started adding onto the document and realized its scope had widened beyond just software developers, that this document could be useful for users as well. I retitled the document, and it is now available on the CardMeeting website at:

http://cardmeeting.com/docs/CardMeetingDataExchange.pdf

This CardMeeting Data Exchange document now discusses the three ways you can work to integrate with and exchange data with CardMeeting:

• Users can get their data into and out of CardMeeting in various useful file formats
• Thirdparty software developers can integrate their solutions directly with CardMeeting using Web Services
• The CardMeeting Applet itself can be embedded into other web applications such that it will appear on thirdparty webpages

CardMeeting is open and versatile. What kinds of new creations you can make that incorporates a CardMeeting!?

The document was finally polished enough that I felt I could feature it on the main CardMeeting.com webpage. Below the big green and blue function panels, there's a new yellow panel for showcasing CardMeeting downloadable documents.

As I mentioned above, CardMeeting can be embedded in your webpages to appear as part of your web applications. I did a lot of testing of this, made many under-the-hood changes to enhance the stability of it, and I produced two different example pages to showcase this ability as referenced in the document, check it out!

• Embed CardMeeting in an iframe on your webpages
• Show your CardMeeting in a popup window

Man, that iframed CardMeeting is sexy. Try doing THAT with Ruby on Rails, right? :P (JUST KIDDING, RoR is fine...)

And the last major effort I undertook for this build was to try to fix some regressions in my browser compatibility. Chiefest was to get IE6 working good again, secondarily was to get legacy JVM support working again (JRE 1.3.1 is now functional with CardMeeting).

During that process, I discovered Firefox 3 beta 3 and 4. And, of course, CardMeeting didn't work right on it. *SIGH* Seriously, if you only knew the machinations the applet goes through to work on all these platforms ... Anyways, I got Firefox 3 working good, and in the process also discovered I could get CardMeeting working on KDE's Konqueror browser (albeit in klunktacular mode due to their deviant Java plugin/Applet support.)

So, I'm very happy with this build. I think it represents some real advances for the CardMeeting engine. Enjoy the new CardMeeting!

Thanks,
Dave Woldrich