Workstreamflow

This one is all about the perspective changing project that I am currently a part of. Workstreamr .The work done in this application has been tremendous. Though I am not in the development team for this project, I have done tit bits for it and I feel I have accomplished more than I ever thought of accomplishing.

The project is an entire shift of the thought process that a normal person undergoes. The original idea conceivers, Stowe, Ben and Sam, had a great thought in mind. To give the users the power to manage , maintain and view data. A truly Open Source oriented concept with Web 2.0 backup. The data has been categorized into groups so that the users could distinguish and relate. The data flows as streams of information and the user has the power to choose to view, respond or ignore.

The feature that I find very intriguing is 'the handing over the power to the user'. Many applications that is web oriented don' do that. They have a fixed way of doing things and the users are happy with it. This lets the users be dumb (like those early days of internet). A wiki based structure with collaboration and information passing is the core 'funda' of this application.

Time based. This is a great shift in perception. The information you see is time based. It shows up taking into consideration the time factor.. It does not have a state maintained. 'Backtracking becomes tricky here and tedious' is a statement that would come into ones mind after this. Versioning is a great system that is used by many Web2.0 based systems to handle this. The change triggers a version which could be backtracked and changes reviewed. The Configuration Management Systems work in this fashion and they work perfectly fine.

Extensibility is another thing I like. How could you be happy with a product which you can't play around with ? (emm ... Windows ? ) . And all platforms are not like the OS-X anyway ! This application lets you fool around with it. I guess the users will love that.

Grouping of data has been a core factor of all databases. Think of a world where you cant correlate or group data. You can't bundle stuff together. That makes a very unrelated series of events which is useless and odd. This grouping is another characteristic that makes this application stand apart from any other one.

Filters. Again a database oriented concept but a general computer science one. Why would I see unwanted information again ? I would rather see filtered information than see all information, even irrelevant ones. If I have a filter already , it is very likely that I will use it again. So I'll store the filter and share them (Web 2.0 comes in again) so that other people with similar tastes could use it.

User management is a main ingredient in any project management system. Assigning, Owning, Tracking Progress are all factors that a Manager would like to do in his Project Management Tool. Versioning also comes into picture here as the application is intended to be stateless.

The Open API is the last thing I would like to write about. In the modern world, a high end graphically excellent functionally proficient web application is doomed if it does not expose a public api for the users to fiddle with. This a part of passing the power on to the user. Workstreamr has this factor in mind and exposes an API which is simple to use. A client will also be created in Adobe AIR ( and that where I come in ) which will let the users request and respond to their data which comes as streams of information.

The first cut will be out in some time but until then it all wait and watch.