Blog Entry

It seems like forever since I've put a blog out which is almost the case. I've been hiding under my rock working on the Kryos product line. We decided over a year ago to start targeting the agriculture vertical, developing customer portals for Grain Handlers which we are calling GrainWaves. This was a logical place to start considering we have a deep history in portals, have done a bunch of work in the Agriculture space and have many people on the team who grew up in rural Saskatchewan with intimate knowledge of the industry.

A funny thing happened on the way to building the product. The plan for GrainWaves was to have a Java portal web based version and mobile blackberry version. While building GrainWaves we built foundational portal components to provide flexibility and rapid development leveraging open source components such as Spring and Hibernate to their fullest extent. Out of that we realized, there's a product of it's own for this foundation which we are calling Competitive Advantage Portal or CAP which we are taking to market.

Then we started on the BlackBerry component. We've done lots of BlackBerry development in the past, using the BlackBerry browser, MDS Studio and custom thick client applications. We didn't like the limitations of browser applications or MDS Studio applications but also didn't like the time and effort required to build custom Java thick client applications using the native API. Trying to think of a better way, we developed a custom viewer on the device that can take in XML from the server and display custom a UI using the Java thick client. This turned into something really interesting. Along the way we developed offline caching capabilities, push functionality, remote administration capabilities, etc, etc. What started out being a quicker way for us to build our GrainWaves BlackBerry applications has turned into a robust platform on the BlackBerry with which we can deploy new applications of virtually any type without writing a single line of BlackBerry code, just server side code to send the appropriate XML down to the client. We are now taking this product to market as Competitive Advantage Portal - mobile or CAPm.

So what started out as a single product has turned into 3 products. I'll post more information about the products but that's a quick overview of why I haven't been blogging lately.